URTHE 
EMORI 

LORD REDESDAL 




Class 

Book . 

Copyright ]s _ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




THE AUTHOR 

Photographed by Furley Lewis, Esq. 



FURTHER MEMORIES 



LORD REDESDALE 

G.C.V.O., G.C.B. 




NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

68 1 Fifth Avenue 






Copyright, 191 7 
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



DEC -B 1917 
H.A477845 



Printed in the United States of America 



V 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction (by Edmund Gosse, C.B.) i 

I. Veluvana 17 

II. Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi . . 60 

III. The Commune 91 

IV. Trees and their Legends .... 108 
V. Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia . 139 

VI. The Wallace Collection 164 

VII. A Note on Russian Studies . . . .211 

VIII. Verba Composita 216 

IX. Russia 252 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING PAGE 



The Author Frontispiece 

Figure of Buddha in the Author's Garden . 24* 
Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds . . 60 

Professor Max Muller .65" 

gustave courbet 95 

The Empress Maria Theresia 140 

Sir Richard Wallace 167 ' 

Richard, Marquis of Hertford, K.G. . . . 170 

Ivan Turgeniev 213 

Friedrich Nietzsche 224 » 

The Emperor Nicholas I 278" 

Prince Gortchakoff 293 ■ 



FURTHER MEMORIES 



LORD REDESDALE'S 
FURTHER MEMORIES 

INTRODUCTION 

BY EDMUND GOSSE, C. B. 

THE publication of Lord Redesdale's "Memories" 
— which was one of the most successful auto- 
biographies of recent times — familiarized thou- 
sands of readers with the principal adventures of a very 
remarkable man, but, when all was said and done, left 
an incomplete impression of his tastes and occupations 
on the minds of those who were not familiar with 
his earlier writings. His literary career had been a very 
irregular one. He took up literature rather late, and 
produced a book that has become a classic — "Tales of 
Old Japan." He did not immediately pursue this success, 
but became involved in public activities of many kinds, 
which distracted his attention. In his sixtieth year he 
brought out "The Bamboo Garden," and from that time 
— until, in his eightieth year, he died in full intellectual 
energy — he constantly devoted himself to the art of 
writing. His zeal, his ambition, were wonderful ; but it 
was impossible to overlook the disadvantage from which 
that ambition and that zeal suffered in the fact that for 
the first sixty years of his life the writer had cultivated 
the art but casually and sporadically. He retained, in 
spite of all the labour which he expended, a certain stiff- 
ness, an air of the amateur, of which he himself was 
always acutely conscious. 

This did not interfere with the direct and sincere ap- 



2 Redesdale's Further Memories 

peal made to general attention by the 191 5 "Memories," 
a book so full of geniality and variety, so independent 
in its judgments and so winning in its ingenuousness, that 
its wider popularity could be the object of no surprise. 
But, to those who knew Lord Redesdale intimately, it 
must always appear that his autobiography fails to ex- 
plain him from what we may call the subjective point of 
view. It tells us of his adventures and friendships, of 
the strange lands he visited and of the unexpected con- 
fidences he received, but it does not reveal very distinctly 
the man himself. There is far more of his intellectual 
constitution, of his personal tastes and mental habits, 
in the volume of essays of 19 12, called "A Tragedy in 
Stone," but even here much is left unsaid and even un- 
suggested. 

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Lord Redes- 
dale was the redundant vitality of his character. His 
nature swarmed with life, like a drop of pond-water 
under a microscope. There cannot be found room in 
any one nature for all the qualities, and what he lacked 
in some degree was concentration. But very few men 
who have lived in our complicated age have done well 
in so many directions as he, or, aiming widely, have 
failed in so few. He shrank from no labour and hesi- 
tated before no difficulty, but pushed on with an extra- 
ordinary energy along many various lines of activity. 
But the two lines in which he most desired and most 
determined to excel, gardening and authorship, are 
scarcely to be discerned, except below the surface, in 
his "Memories." Next to his books, what he regarded 
with most satisfaction was his wonderful garden at Bats- 
ford, and of this there is scarcely a word of record in 
the autobiography. He had always intended to celebrate 
this garden, and when he was preparing to return to 



Introduction 3 

Batsford in 191 5 he wrote to me that he was going to 
write an "Apologia pro Horto meo," as long before he 
had composed one "pro Bambusis meis." A book which 
should combine with the freest fancies of his intellect a 
picture of the exotic groves of Batsford was what was 
required to round off Lord Redesdale's literary adven- 
tures. It will be seen that he very nearly succeeded in 
thus setting the top-stone on his literary career. 

One reason, perhaps, why Batsford, which was ever 
present to his thoughts, is so very slightly and vaguely 
mentioned in Lord Redesdale's "Memories," may be the 
fact that from 19 10 onwards he was not living in it 
himself, and that it was irksome to him to magnify in 
print horticultural beauties which were for the time be- 
ing in the possession of others. The outbreak of the 
war, in which all his five sons were instantly engaged, 
was the earliest of a series of changes which completely 
altered the surface of Lord Redesdale's life. Batsford 
came once more into his personal occupation, and at the 
same time it became convenient to give up his London 
house in Kensington Court. Many things combined to 
transform his life in the early summer of 191 5. His 
eldest son, Major the Hon. Clement Mitford, after bril- 
liantly distinguished himself in battle, was received by 
the King and decorated, to the rapturous exultation of 
his father. Major Mitford returned to the French front, 
only to fall on the 13th of May, 191 5. 

At this time I was seeing Lord Redesdale very fre- 
quently, and I could not but be struck by the effect of 
this blow upon his temperament. After the first shock 
of sorrow, I observed in him the determination not to 
allow himself to be crushed. His dominant vitality as- 
serted itself almost with violence, and he seemed to 
clench his teeth in defiance of the blow to his individu- 



4 Redesdale's Further Memories 

ality. It required on the part of so old a man no 
little fortitude, for it is easier to bear a great and heroic 
bereavement than to resist the wearing vexation of see- 
ing one's system of daily occupation crumbling away. 
Lord Redesdale was pleased to be going again to Bats- 
ford, which had supplied him in years past with so much 
sumptuous and varied entertainment, but it was a matter 
of alarm with him to give up all, or almost all, the vari- 
ous ties with London which had meant so much to his 
vividly social nature. 

Meanwhile, during the early months of 191 5 in 
London, he had plenty of employment in finishing and 
revising his "Memories," which it had taken him two 
years to write. This was an occupation which bridged 
over the horrid chasm between his old active life in 
London, with its thousand interests, and the uncertain 
and partly dreaded prospect of an exile in the bamboo- 
gardens of a remote corner of Gloucestershire, where his 
deafness must needs exclude him from the old activities 
of local life. 

He finished revising the manuscript of his "Memories" 
in July, and then went down, while the actual transfer- 
ence of his home took place, to the Royal Yacht Squadron 
Castle, Cowes, where he had been accustomed to spend 
some of the most enjoyable hours of his life. But this 
scene, habitually thronged with people, and palpitating 
with gaiety, in the midst of which Lord Redesdale found 
himself so singularly at home, was now, more than per- 
haps any other haunt of the English sportsman, in 
complete eclipse. The weather was lovely, but there 
were no yachts, no old chums, no charming ladies. "It 
is very dull," he wrote ; "the sole inhabitant of the Club 
besides myself was Lord Falkland, and now he is gone." 
In these conditions Lord Redesdale became suddenly con- 



Introduction 5 

scious that the activity of the last two or three years 
was over, that the aspect of his world had changed, and 
that he was in danger of losing that hold upon life to 
which he so resolutely clung. In conditions of this kind he 
always turned to seek for something mentally "craggy," 
as Byron said, and at Cowes he wonderfully found the 
writings of Nietzsche. The result is described in a re- 
markable letter to myself (July 28th, 1915), which I 
quote because it marks the earliest stage in the compo- 
sition of his last unfinished book: 

"I have been trying to occupy myself with 
Nietzsche, on the theory that there must be some- 
thing great about a man who exercised the immense 
influence that he did. But I confess I am no con- 
vert to any of his various moods. Here and there 
I find gems of thought but one has to wade through 
a morass of blue mud to get at them. Here is a 
capital saying of his which may be new to you — 
in a letter to his friend Rohde he writes : 'Eternally 
we need midwives in order to be delivered of our 
thoughts.' We cannot work in solitude. 'Woe to 
us who lack the sunlight of a friend's presence.' 

"How true that is! When I come down here, I 
think that with so much time on my hands I shall 
be able to get through a pile of work. Not a bit 
of it! I find it difficult even to write a note. To 
me it is an imperative necessity to have the sym- 
pathetic counsel of a friend." 

The letter continued with an impassioned appeal to 
his correspondent to find some definite intellectual work 
for him to undertake. "You make me dare, and that 
is much towards winning a game. You must sharpen 
my wits, which are blunt enough just now." In short, 



6 Redesdale's Further Memories 

it was a cry from the island of boredom to come over 
the water and administer first-aid. 

Accordingly, I started for Cowes, and was welcomed 
at the pier with all my host's habitual and vivacious 
hospitality. Scarcely were we seated in our wicker- 
chairs in face of the Solent, not twinkling as usual with 
pleasure-sails, but sinister with strange instruments of 
warfare, than he began the attack. "What am I to do 
with myself?" was the instant question; "what means 
can I find of occupying this dreadful void of leisure?" 
To which the obvious reply was: "First of all, you must 
exhibit to me the famous attraction of Cowes!" "There 
are none," he replied in comic despair, but we presently 
invented some, and my visit, which extended over sev- 
eral radiant days of a perfect August, was diversified 
with walks and excursions by land and water in which 
my companion was as active and as ardent as though 
he had been nineteen instead of seventy-nine. In a 
suit picturesquely marine, with his beautiful silver hair 
escaping from a jaunty yachting cap, he was the last 
expression of vivacity and gaiety. 

The question of his intellectual occupation in the 
future came, however, incessantly to the front; and our 
long talks in the strange and uncanny solitude of the 
Royal Yacht Squadron Castle always came back to this: 
What task was he to take up next? His large auto- 
biography was now coming back to him from the printers 
in packets of proof, with which he was closeted night 
and morning; and I suggested that while this was going 
on there was no need for him to think about future 
enterprises. To tell the truth, I had regarded the 
"Memories" as likely to be the final labour of Lord 
Redesdale's busy life. It seemed to me that at his ad- 
vanced age he might now well withdraw into dignified 



Introduction 7 

repose. I even hinted so much in terms as delicate as 
I could make them, but the suggestion was not well 
received. I became conscious that there was nothing 
he was so little prepared to welcome as "repose;" that, 
in fact, the terror which possessed him was precisely the 
dread of having to withdraw from the stage of life. 
His deafness, which now began to be excessive, closed 
to his eager spirit so many of the avenues of experience, 
that he was more than ever anxious to keep clear those 
that remained to him, and of these, literary expression 
came to be almost the only one left. In the absence of 
a definite task his path in this direction led through 
darkness. 

But it was not until after several suggestions and 
many conversations that light was found. The friend 
so pressingly appealed to returned to London, where 
he was stern in rejecting several projects, hotly flung at 
his head and then coldly abandoned. A study of the 
Empress Maria Theresa, suggested by a feverish perusal 
of Pechler, was the latest and least attractive of these. 
Lord Redesdale then frankly demanded that a subject 
should be found for him. "You have brought this 
upon yourself," he said, "by encouraging me to write. 
What might prove the scheme of a very pleasant book 
then occurred to us, and it was suggested to the fiery 
and impatient author, who had by this time retired for 
good to Batsford, that he should compose a volume of 
essays dealing with things in general, but bound together 
by a constantly repeated reference to his wild garden of 
bamboos and the Buddha in his secret grove. The 
author was to suppose himself seated with a friend on 
the terrace at the top of the garden, and to let the idea 
of the bamboo run through the whole tissue of reflec- 
tions and reminiscences like an emerald thread. Lord 



8 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Redesdale was enchanted, and the idea took fire at once. 
He replied: 

"You are Orpheus, with his lute moving the 
rocks and stones ! I shall work all my conceits into 
your plan, and am now proceeding to my garden 
shrine to meditate on it. I will try to make a 
picture of the Veluvana, the bamboo garden which 
was the first Vikara or monastery of Buddha and 
his disciples. There I will sit, and, looking on the 
great statue of Buddha in meditation, I shall begin 
to arrange all sorts of wild imaginings which may 
come into my crazy brain." 

In this way was started the book, of which, alas ! only 
such fragments were composed as form the earlier part 
of the present volume. It is, however, right to point 
out that for the too-brief remainder of his life Lord 
Redesdale was eagerly set on the scheme of which a 
hint has just been given. The Veluvana was to be the 
crowning production of his literary life, and to sum up 
the wisdom of the East and the gaiety of the West. He 
spoke of it incessantly, in letters and conversation. "That 
will do to go into Veluvana," was his cry when he met 
with anything rare or strange. For instance, on the 
15th of September, 191 5, he wrote to me: 

"To-day, all of a sudden I was struck by the idea 
that plants, having many human qualities, may also 
in some degree have human motives — that they are 
not altogether mere automata — and as I thought, I 
began to imagine that I could detect something re- 
sembling purpose in the movements of certain plants. 
I have jotted down a few notes, and you will see 
when I expand them that at any rate the idea calls 



Introduction 9 

attention to the movements themselves, some of 
which seem never to have been noticed at all, or 
certainly at best very inadequately. You will see 
that this brings in the bamboo garden and Buddha, 
and so keeps to the scheme of Veluvana." 

The monasteries of twelfth-century Japanese Budd- 
hism, which he had visited long before in the neighbour- 
hood of Kioto, now recurred to his memory, and he 
proposed to describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed 
from an Indian Buddhist monk. This was a theme of 
extraordinary interest, and wholly germane to his pur- 
pose. It drove him back to his Japanese books, and to 
his friend Sir Ernest Satow's famous dictionary. He 
wrote to me: 

"No praise can be too high for the work which 
Satow did in the early days of our intercourse with 
Japan. He was a valuable asset to England, and 
to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his energy and 
force of character, would never have succeeded as 
he did without Satow. Aston was another very 
strong man." 

His reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit 
of Veluvana, but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale 
wrote in this direction proves to be too slight for publica- 
tion. He met with some expressions of extremely 
modern Japanese opinion which annoyed him, and to 
which he was tempted to give more attention than they 
deserve. It began to be obvious that the enterprise was 
one for which great concentration of effort, and a cer- 
tain serenity of purpose which was not to be secured at 
will, were imperatively needed. In leaving London, he 
was not content, and no one could have wished him to 



io Redesdale's Further Memories 

be willing, to break abruptly all the cords of his past 
life. He was still a Trustee of the National Gallery, 
still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still occupied 
with the administration of the Wallace Collection, and 
he did not abate his interest in these directions. They 
made it necessary that he should come up to town every 
other week. This made up in some measure for the in- 
evitable disappointment of finding that in Gloucester- 
shire his deafness now completely cut him off from all 
the neighbourly duties which had in earlier years diversi- 
fied and entertained his country life. He had been a 
great figure among the squires and farmers of the Cots- 
wolds, but all this was now at an end, paralysed by the 
hopeless decay of his hearing. It grieved him, too, that 
he was unable to do any useful war-work in the county, 
and he was forced to depend upon his pen and his flying 
visits to London for refreshment. He was a remarkably 
good letter-writer, and he now demanded almost pathet- 
ically to be fed with the apples of correspondence. He 
wrote (November 26th, 191 5): 

"Your letters are a consolation for being deprived 
of taking a part any longer in the doings of the 
great world. The Country Mouse — even if the 
creature were able to scuttle back into the cellars 
of the great — would still be out of all communion 
with the mighty owing to physical infirmity. And 
now comes the kind Town Mouse and tells him all 
that he most cares to know." 

He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made 
the most of both. "I hate the autumn," he said, "for 
it means the death of the year, but I try to make the 
death of the garden as beautiful as possible." Among 
his plants, and up and down the high places of his 



Introduction n 

bamboo-feathered rockeries, where little cascades fell 
with a music which he could no longer hear into small 
dark pools full of many-coloured water-lilies, his activity 
was like that of a boy. He had the appearance, the 
tastes, the instincts of vigorous manhood prolonged far 
beyond the usual limit of such gifts, and yet all were 
marred and rendered bankrupt for him by the one in- 
tolerable defect, the deafness which had by this time 
become almost impenetrable to sound. 

Yet it seemed as though this disability actually 
quickened his mental force. With the arrival of his 
eightieth year, his activity and curiosity of intellect was 
certainly rather increased than abated. He wrote to me 
from Batsford (December 28th, 1915): 

"I have been busy for the last two months 
making a close study of Dante. I have read all the 
Inferno and half of the Purgatorio. It is hard 
work, but the 'readings' of my old schoolfellow, 
W. W. Vernon, are an incalculable help, and now 
within the last week or two has appeared Hoare's 
Italian Dictionary, published by the Cambridge 
University Press. A much-needed book, for the 
previous dictionaries were practically useless except 
for courier's work. How splendid Dante is! But 
how sickening are the Commentators, Benvenuto da 
Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of them? They 
won't let the poet say that the sun shone or the 
night was dark without seeing some hidden and 
mystic meaning in it. They always seem to chercher 
midi a quatorze heures, and irritate me beyond 
measure. There is invention enough in Dante with- 
out all their embroidery. But this grubbing and 
grouting seems to be infectious among Dante 
scholars — they all catch the disease." 



12 Redesdale's Further Memories 

He flung himself into these Italian studies with all 
his accustomed ardour. He corresponded with the 
eminent veteran of Dante scholarship, the Honourable 
W. W. Vernon, whom he mentions in the passage just 
quoted, and Mr. Vernon's letters gave him great delight. 
He wrote to me again: 

"This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. 
Of course, I knew the catch quotations in Dante, 
but I never before attempted to read him. The 
difficulty scared me." 

Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction. 
He worked away for hours at a time, braving the mono- 
tonies of the Purgatorio without flagging, but he broke 
down early in the Paradiso. He had no sympathy what- 
ever with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was ex- 
tremely bored by the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the 
Empyrean. I confess I took advantage of this to recall 
his attention to the Veluvana, for which it was no longer 
possible to hope that the author would collect any ma- 
terial out of Dante. 

An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on 
Russian history during the Long Vacation of 19 16 was 
a compliment to the value of the Russian chapters of 
his "Memories," but it was another distraction. It took 
his thoughts away from Veluvana, although he protested 
to me that he could prepare his Cambridge address, and 
yet continue to marshal his fancies for the book. Per- 
haps I doubted it, and dared to disapprove, for he wrote 
(March 17th, 1916): 

"You scold me for writing too much. That is 
the least of my troubles! You must remember 
that debarred as I am from taking part in society, 



Introduction 13 

the Three R's alone remain to me, and, indeed, of 
those only two — for owing to my having enjoyed 
an Eton education in days when arithmetic was 
deemed to be no part of the intellectual panoply of 
a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide ! 
I am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time 
to time." 

He was really composing more actively than he himself 
realized. About this time he wrote: 

"Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord 
Hertford — not the Marquess of Steyne, that would 
be impossible — but the unhappy hypochondriac 
recluse of the Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been 
most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English 
Colony in Paris — all his faults exaggerated, none of 
his good qualities even hinted at. The good British 
public has so long been used to look upon him as 
a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse 
it to be told that he had many admirable points." 

At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redes- 
dale was very remarkable. He had settled down into his 
life at Batsford, diversified by the frequent dashes to 
London. His years seemed to sit upon him more lightly 
than ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown 
back, the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, 
were the external symbols of an inner man perpetually 
fresh, ready for adventure and delighted with the 
pageant of existence. He found no fault at all with life, 
save that it must leave him, and he had squared his 
shoulders not to give way to weakness. Perhaps the 
only sign of weakness was just that visible determination 
to be strong. But the features of his character had 



14 Redesdale's Further Memories 

none of those mental wrinkles, those "rides de l'esprit," 
which Montaigne describes as proper to old age. Lord 
Redesdale was guiltless of the old man's self-absorption 
or exclusive interest in the past. His curiosity and sym- 
pathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, and so, in 
spite of his amusing violence in denouncing his own 
forgetfulness, was his memory of passing events. In the 
petulance of his optimism he was like a lad. 

There was no change in the early part of last year, 
although it was manifest that the incessant journeying 
between Batsford and London was exhausting. The 
garden occupied him more and more, and he was dis- 
tracted by the great storm of the end of March, which 
blew down and destroyed at the head of the bridge the 
wonderful group of cypresses, which he called "the pride 
of my old age." But, after a gesture of despair, he set 
himself energetically to repair the damage. He was 
in his usual buoyant health when the very hot spell in 
May tempted him out on the 18th of May, with his 
agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbrook, a beautiful 
village on his Oxfordshire property, of which he was 
particularly fond. He was not successful, and in a 
splenetic mood he flung himself at full length upon a 
bank of wet grass. He was not allowed to remain there 
long, but the mischief was done, and in a few hours he 
was suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result 
might not have been serious had it not been that in a 
few days' time he was due to fulfil certain engagements 
in town. Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale more than not 
to keep a pledge. In all such matters he prided himself 
on being punctual and trustworthy, and he refused to 
change his plans by staying at home. 

Accordingly, on the 23rd of May he came to London 
to transact some business, and to take the chair on the 



Introduction 15 

24th of May at a meeting of the Royal Society of Litera- 
ture, of which he was a vice-president. This meeting 
took place in the afternoon, and he addressed a crowded 
assembly, which greeted him with great warmth. Those 
who were present, and saw his bright eyes and heard 
his ringing voice, could have no suspicion that they 
would see him again no more. His intimate friends 
alone perceived that he was making a superlative effort. 
There followed a very bad night, and he went down to 
Batsford next day, going straight to his bed, from which 
he never rose again. His condition, at first, gave rise 
to little alarm. The disease, which proved to be catarrhal 
jaundice, took its course; but for a long time his spirit 
and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him and 
filled those around him with hope. There was no dis- 
turbance of mind to the very last. In a shaky hand, with 
his stylograph, he continued to correspond with certain 
friends, about politics, and books, and even about Velu- 
vana. In the beginning of August there seemed to be 
symptoms of improvement, but these were soon followed 
by a sudden and final relapse. Even after this, Lord 
Redesdale's interest and curiosity were sustained. In 
his very last letter to myself, painfully scrawled only one 
week before his death, he wrote: 

"Have you seen Ernest Daudet's book just pub- 
lished, 'Les auteurs de la guerre de 1914'? Bis- 
marck is the subject of the first volume; the second 
will deal with the Kaiser and the Emperor Joseph; 
and the third with 'leurs complices.' I know E. D. ; 
he is a brother of Alphonse, and is a competent 
historian. His book is most illuminating. Of 
course there are exaggerations, but he is always well 
documente, and there is much in his work that is 



1 6 Redesdale's Further Memories 

new. I don't admire his style. The abuse of the 
historic present is bad enough, but what can be said 
in favour of the historic future with which we meet 
at every step? It sets my teeth on edge." 

But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later 
he passed into an unconscious state, dying peacefully at 
noon of the 17th of August, 19 16. He was saved, as he 
had wished to be, from all consciousness of decrepitude. 

Edmund Gosse. 



CHAPTER I 

Veluvana 

THESE chapters are simply an attempt to 
record the gist of some conversations and 
noonday thoughts, which have arisen 
from time to time in idle moments spent in a garden 
on the Cotswold Hills, where there are gathered 
together certain features unusual in Western 
pleasances. Our thoughts are largely the creations 
of our surroundings, and when at every step I am 
met by some work of art or a plant which has 
travelled perhaps twelve thousand miles to give me 
a greeting from afar, then I, too, begin to travel 
and am carried away beyond the seas. If here 
and there I think and talk of things nearer home, 
my .thoughts are still those of the wanderer — still 
those which are suggested by the mysterious thrill- 
ing of one of those chords for which there is noth- 
ing to account, but which never vibrate as they do 
in my Veluvana, the bamboo grove of Buddha, 
which thus becomes a temple dedicated to 
Mnemosyne. 

One thing I wish to disclaim. I am often told 
that people believe that I have a Japanese garden. 
I have nothing of the kind. A Japanese garden 

17 



1 8 Redesdale's Further Memories 

is a mystery hard to be understood; it is a work 
of art depending upon certain fixed laws and canons 
prescribed, many centuries ago, by a school of 
Aesthetes, whose lives were spent in the punctilious 
observance of the rules prescribed for tea-drinking 
and incense-burning and the writing of sonnets, in 
grounds laid out upon principles, of which the 
slightest violation would be an outrage upon the 
decencies of culture. In such gardens flowers play 
but a small part, but the shapes, the position and 
the orientation of quaint rocks, the introduction of 
miniature lakes, and even of the similitude of rivers 
carried out in sand or gravel, with stepping stones 
by which they may be crossed without disturbing 
the smooth surface, these and many other whims 
are the important but sober and yet fantastic fea- 
tures upon which the Japanese landscape gar- 
dener insists. 

Trees and flowering shrubs — such as cherries 
and plums — lianes like the Wistaria and the orna- 
mental vines, are used with the utmost discretion, 
as they are with us. But the introduction of alien 
plants, the exhibition of bronze ornaments and 
lanterns, or the naturalistic arrangement of rock- 
work with a streamlet crossed by lacquered bridges, 
no more give a garden the claim to be called Japan- 
ese than the possession of a piece of old Greek 
sculpture would liken a house to the Acropolis of 
Athens, or than skill in the pretty and very difficult 
game of kicking shuttlecocks with the heel would 



Veluvana 19 

entitle a Pekinese boy to claim kinship with a Rugby 
football player. 

A Japanese garden has a certain poetry and 
secret charm of its own. To those who are 
adepts in its mysteries it is full of suggestion, but 
it is highly artificial; everything that you see in it 
is a contradiction of Nature, who, poor dear! is 
forced into obeying every craze and vagary of the 
artist, not being allowed to see a twig or a bud take 
the direction which she destined for it. In that it 
lacks the sweet simplicity and countrified untutored 
grace of our English Edens. It is not a place in 
which a young maiden would gather a posy be^ 
jewelled with May dew, or stoop to consult the 
ray-florets of a daisy as to the beating of her lover's 
heart. 

There are many crafts in which we English folk 
have much to learn from abroad ; in gardening that 
is not so — there we are not unskilled, indeed rather 
copied than copiers. We have our own gardens and 
we may rest content with them, since they give us 
without stint the full joys of form and colour, 
beauty and fragrance. What more do we want? 
The gardens of the Japanese may suit the fairies 
of their own legends, but the great god Pan would 
surely rather see his Dryads and Wood-nymphs 
tread a measure on the velvet of a trim English 
lawn, than picking their way among cruel stones 
to the torture of their rosy feet. 

But though we may not be minded to imitate 



20 Redesale's Further Memories 

in our own homes the eccentricities and fancies of 
Japanese garden experts — whims and fancies 
handicapped by the severities of austere tradition 
— there is no law to hinder us from taking a hint 
from some of the effects which they achieve, nor 
from introducing into our gardens some great mas- 
terpiece of one of those exquisitely imaginative 
artists whose smaller and daintier works are gems 
welcomed with such warmth elsewhere. 

Some months after the above lines were written 
there appeared in the Times of May 6th, 191 6, one 
of those charming articles on gardening with which 
we are from time to time favoured, in which the 
writer expresses much the same view of the Japan- 
ese gardener's art that I hold. Only in one point 
I differ from him. It is not "a close study of 
nature" which guides the Japanese landscape 
maker; on the contrary, he follows whims and 
symbols hard to be understood. Every distorted 
stone which he brings at great expense from a huge 
distance must be so placed as to be in harmony 
with some cryptic principle of sestheticism. Nature 
is not what he aims at. 

The Japanese, who have an exquisite system of 
their own of natural gardening, though of garden- 
ing in which all is designed and nothing left to 
chance, are very sparing of flowers. They would 
rather have one blossom where it will tell as a de- 
lightful surprise than a thousand where they merely 
make a mass of colour. Placing is everything to 



Veluvana 21 

them, but their principles of placing and grouping 
are got from the close study of nature, like an 
artist's principles of composition. We must not 
imitate them, for if we do, we shall merely parody 
them. Bamboos and stones and lanterns will not 
make a Japanese garden. 

But we can grasp the principles on which they 
express their love of nature in a garden; we can 
see clearly what is the difference between formal 
and natural gardening, and avoid the mistake of 
trying to combine the beauties of both. One is 
always uncomfortable in a garden when there are 
a thousand flowers where a hundred would be 
better. One may not be aware of the waste, but it 
wearies one all the same. 

The fascination of the East never dies. But 
there comes a fatal time when, to the voice of the 
Siren, sing she never so tenderly, there is no re- 
sponse. Age and new duties have forged fetters, 
sweet and soft as rose-leaves, but so binding that 
not even the loadstone mountain of Sindbad the 
Sailor would avail to tear them away from us, and 
so we are fain to satisfy our travel-hunger as best 
we may, feeding upon memory. Then it is that 
the relics gathered together during the adventures 
of many years acquire a new and almost sacred 
value. They speed the flight of our thoughts like 
the wings of Pegasus. The man who has chaf- 
fered with the Jew merchants in the picturesque 
gloom of the bazaars of Stamboul ; who has bathed 



22 Redesdale's Further Memories 

in Jordan and Scamander, and slept in the black 
tents of the Bedouin; who has wandered through 
the mysterious portals of the Chien Men, the 
frowning gate of the Tartar city, to sip tea with 
some art expert in the Liu Li Chang, the Pater- 
noster Row of Peking, listening to stories of the 
dilettanti in the reign of Chien Lung the magnifi- 
cent — such a man, if now he can do no more than 
trim the silken sails of his imagination, bound for 
the lands of enchantment, must have about him 
many a treasure which, if he but shut his eyes and 
give himself up to the luxury of dreaming day- 
dreams, will bring back to the old wanderer a whiff 
from the birthplace of the Sun, a whiff sweeter in 
his nostrils than those cloying perfumes to which 
the aesthetes, according to their affected euphuist 
jargon, "listened" centuries ago in the lovely gar- 
dens of Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion of the 
sacred city of Kioto.* 

As for me, I have been all my life bitten by the 
collector's mania, and so the wings of my Pegasus 
have many feathers; for my house, and even my 
gardens, are full of curious odds and ends, the 
spoil of many lands. On the terrace standing sen- 
try at the entrance to the house are two huge bronze 
Kylins (in Pekingese, Chih Ling), representations 
of the mystic beast which was seen last at the birth 
of Confucius, and will not reappear until ten thou- 
sand years shall have elapsed from that date. 

* See my "Garter Mission to Japan," pp. 193-203. 



Veluvana 23 

The male has a single horn and is very fierce, 
but not more so than his hornless mate, which, 
with her cruel tusks, grins defiance at the world. 
Just such another pair in the Imperial Park of the 
Ten Thousand Longevities at Yuen Ming Yuen 
used to raise my wonder fifty years ago. Built 
into the wall of one of the two little gazebos which 
are at the east and west ends of my terrace are two 
bricks — the one rough and rugged, sun-dried and 
splashed with the mortar of more than two thou- 
sand years since, from the Great Wall of China 
at Ku Pei Kou ; the other white, smooth and richly 
glazed from the famous Porcelain Tower of Nan- 
king, which was destroyed by the Tai Ping rebels 
some sixty years ago, before they were overtaken 
by the Vengeance of Gordon and "the Ever- Vic- 
torious Army." 

Shall I ever forget the tramp of a couple of 
miles under an August sun in 1865 with that huge 
brick from the Great Wall seeming to bite into my 
aching shoulder? Over against the little summer- 
house, guarding the entrance to the garden from 
the attacks of evil spirits, are small statues of the 
Ni-o, the two kings whose ugliness is enough to 
scare away any inauspicious demons who might be 
about. They must miss the ritual of their own 
country where the pious pilgrim, having written 
his prayer on to a scrap of paper, chews it into a 
pellet, and spits it at the sacred figure. If it 
sticks, all is well, and the prayer will be heard; 



24 Redesdale's Further Memories 

if it falls to earth, the fates will be unkind — so out- 
side a fashionable temple the two gods are bespat- 
tered all over with an eruption of moist pellets. 
Here from that holy rite they are immune. 

High up in the wildest part of the wild garden, 
under the shade of a spreading oak, there stands, 
or rather sits, turned towards the East, as is fitting, 
a bronze statue of Buddha of heroic size. His hand 
is raised in the attitude of preaching; his features 
are expressive of the holy calm and noble abstrac- 
tion which are traditional in the effigies of the great 
reformer; the centre of the skull is slightly raised, 
and between the brows is a curl, representing the 
wind, the mystic white lock. These two are among 
the many secret birth-signs by which the sooth- 
sayers and diviners recognize in a newly-born babe 
the advent of a Boohisatva, or future Buddha. 
Surrounding the figure are planted chusan palms 
from China and bamboos from the Himalaya moun- 
tains, among which a stag and a hind, life-sized 
bronze representations of the small Japanese deer, 
watch over the loneliness of the thinker. Facing 
the statue is a rest-house, flanked by two huge 
bronze lanterns bearing the chrysanthemum and 
the Pawlonia flower, the two crests of the Mikado, 
and on either side of the door are two small white 
granite elephants, brought from Ceylon, Buddhis- 
tic symbols, full of significance. A little higher up 
the hill a pergola leads to a tiny spring, with a dol- 




FIGURE OF BUDDHA IN THE AUTHOR'S GARDEN 



Veluvana 25 

phin spout, from which fitfully, for it is often dry, 
a runlet of pure water trickles into a stone basin. 

Immediately opposite is an ishi-dori, one of those 
granite lanterns which you have seen in every 
Japanese temple. Lower down the hill is a grand 
bronze lion, with his paws resting upon a ball of 
cloisonne enamel, symbolical of the strength of 
Buddha, and in the middle of the walled garden is a 
dragon fountain, spouting water into a tiny pond 
full of pink water-lilies and gold-fish. We West- 
erns are wont to talk of fiery dragons; not so the 
Orientals. With them the dragon is a creature of 
the water, and so is used in art for fountains just 
as we use the lion's head, taking the idea from the 
Egyptian, who imagined that the rising of the Nile 
took place when the Sun was in Leo. In China the 
dragon represents the principle >f good, the tiger 
that of evil ; the thunderstorm is a fight between the 
two. 

All these things have their meaning, and here, 
as you sit in the broad verandah of the rest-house, 
represent two scenes in the life of the Buddha; 
firstly, the preaching of the first sermon in the 
Migha-deva, the deer forest near Benares, where 
the stags and hinds come to listen to the Holy One, 
and, secondly, the Veluvana, or Bamboo grove, 
which King Bimbisara presented to the Buddha 
and which became the first Vihara, monastery or 
meeting-place, of the new sect's adherents and 



26 Redesdale's Further Memories 

monks. The story of the Veluvana is that of Ahab 
and Naboth the Jezreelite over again. Some six 
hundred years more or less before our era — how 
much more or how much less is a matter of small 
moment, though the learned must needs break 
their heads in the vain attempt to fix the exact dates 
of these events — there reigned in Maghada King 
Bimbisara, a monarch not a little feared. 

Before he mounted the throne he greatly had set 
his heart upon a certain grove, or garden belonging 
to a householder who would not part with it. So 
he determined to bide his time until he should be- 
come king, and then to kill the man and take his 
land. This he did, and the lawful owner, who after 
death was born again in the shape of a poisonous 
snake, sought an occasion to fix his deadly fangs 
in the king. One day the king had gone into the 
garden with his wives, and fell asleep while only 
one of the women was by him. Then the snake, 
crawling close to him, was about to strike, when 
some Kalantaka birds seized it and began to scream. 
This woke the woman, who jumped up and killed 
the snake. 

In gratitude to the birds who had saved his life, 
the king caused the garden to be planted with bam- 
boos, which they love, and the place became known 
as the Kalantakanivasa Veluvana, or the Bamboo 
grove of the Kalantaka birds. Barthelemy St. 
Hilaire, following the story of the Chinese pilgrim 
Hsiian Chivang (of whom I hope to speak later), 



Veluvana 27 

gives a less romantic derivation to the name Kalan- 
takanivasa. Kalanta, as he tells the tale, was a 
rich merchant, who had originally given his garden 
to the Brahmans, but having received the sublime 
Law, he took it away from them and transferred 
it to the Buddha. I hope that this may not be the 
true story, for in that case the name would simply 
mean the Bamboo grove, or garden of Kalanta, 
and so the birds and the snake must fade into the 
clouds of fancy. 

According to the more legendary version of the 
story, it is written that when the Blessed One, hav- 
ing attained the supreme wisdom, entered upon his 
ministry, after six years of meditation, and an 
asceticism which had almost starved his very life, 
he came with his disciples to Rajagriha, where he 
was visited by Bimbisara, King of Maghada. This 
king had had five wishes : ( 1 ) That a Buddha might 
appear during his reign; (2) that he might him- 
self see him ; (3) that he might learn the truth from 
him; (4) that he might understand it; (5) that he 
might follow his commandments. When the king 
saw the Buddha and listened to his preaching, he 
was converted with many of his people, and invited 
the Blessed One to come to his city, where he set 
a great feast before him. When the feast was over, 
the king solemnly poured water over the hands of 
the Blessed One, saying, "I give the Kalantakani- 
vasa Veluvana to the Blessed One to dispose of as 
may please him." And that is how it came to pass 



28 Redesdale's Further Memories 

that a grove of bamboos was the first Vihara, or 
meeting-place of Buddha and his saints. 

Full of poetry and Indian mysticism are the 
legends and fairy tales which monkish superstition 
has woven round the life of the Buddha, doing him 
and his memory no good service thereby ; for when 
truth is overgrown with fables, like some fair 
flower choked by weeds, it becomes lost to sight and 
strangled, and men begin to doubt whether, indeed, 
it had any existence. In this way some doctors 
have been led to deny that such a man as the 
Buddha ever lived upon earth; men of learning 
have spent much profound scholarship on proving 
that he was merely a sun-myth; others have ex- 
plained him away as being in some sort an astro- 
nomical allegory. It would be as easy to explain 
away Napoleon Buonaparte — indeed, did not that 
cunning logician, Archbishop Whately, making fun 
out of his own science, prove irrefutably by rule of 
syllogism that no such man as Napoleon ever did 
or ever could have existed? 

That Buddha was a very real man, inspired by 
the highest ideals, is a fact which all advance in 
knowledge proves more and more conclusively. 
Facts cannot be swept away like cobwebs; indeed, 
cobwebs are facts, as every housewife knows, and 
though a besom may annihilate them, their rebirth 
remains a demonstrable truth. So it is with the 
Buddha. The travels of Fa Hsien and Hsiian 
Chwang, Chinese pilgrims, who in the fifth and sev- 



Veluvana 29 

enth centuries of our era went to India to collect 
Buddhist books and study the dogmas and history 
of the religion, have been recorded with all the 
scrupulous care and minuteness peculiar to their 
nation, and show the veneration in which the sites 
and monuments sacred to the Buddhist story were 
still held in their day. Nor is that all. 

Within the last twenty years, under the authority 
of the Indian Government, researches have been 
carried on by a learned Babu named Chandra Muk- 
herji, under the direction of Mr. Vincent A. Smith, 
and those researches, which are of the highest in- 
terest, corroborate the statements of the two Chi- 
nese monks, in whose accounts the differences are 
no more than what would be expected in the work 
of men separated by an interval of two hundred 
years. 

If we must remember that Prince Siddartha 
claimed no divinity — nor even divine inspiration or 
revelation — then stripped of the husk of fable and 
vain tales with which monkish folly has overlaid 
and obscured it, there is no more touching story 
in man's record than that of the great renunciation 
with which Buddha entered upon the work to which 
he felt himself called. Brought up in the soul- 
stealing languor of an Oriental court, he left every- 
thing in order to face the hardships of a solitude 
and asceticism in which he was to find that peace 
which the world could not give to him, but which, 



30 Redesdale's Further Memories 

if only he could attain the supreme wisdom, he 
might give to the world. 

Prince Siddartha, the Buddha that was to be, 
was the son of Suddhodana, King of Kapilavastu 
in the Tarai of Nepal, under the shadow of the 
giant Himalaya mountains. Suddhodana was the 
chief of the Shakya, a proud clan, descended from 
the solar race of the Gautama. It puzzles the un- 
instructed reader to find the Buddha often referred 
to as Shakya Muni, or Gautama Buddha. The first 
of these titles means the hermit or recluse of the 
Shakya clan, and Barthelemy St. Hilaire connects 
the word muni with the Greek /noVos, the French 
moine, etc. Gautama Buddha simply means the 
Buddha of the Gautama race, in contradistinction 
to the many Buddhas that preceded him during the 
countless aeons in which the Indians believe, and to 
those Buddhas that are yet to be, the next of whom 
is the Maitrya Buddha, the Buddha of brotherly 
love, for whom we have to wait many thousand 
years, and who is often represented as lying down 
and laughing — a favourite subject with Chinese 
sculptors and artists. The Queen of King Suddho- 
dana was the daughter of King Suprabuddha, a 
neighbouring monarch, a princess of such surpass- 
ing loveliness, wisdom and virtue, that she was 
called Maya the Illusion, for men could not believe 
that so wondrous a being could be aught but a 
dream, a vision, an unreal phantasy. 

One night Queen Maya dreamt a dream : in her 



Veluvana 31 

sleep it seemed to her that a white elephant with 
six golden tusks entered her side. She dreamt, 
moreover, that she was moving in heavenly space, 
that she ascended a great rocky mountain, and that 
a vast multitude bowed down before her. When 
the soothsayers came to interpret her dream, they 
declared that they meant that she would bring forth 
a son who should be marked with the thirty-two 
signs which indicate a great man. Either he would 
remain in his kingdom and become conqueror and 
monarch of the universe, or he would forsake home 
and the world and receive the full light of wisdom 
as a perfect Buddha. Now, when the time of her 
delivery came near to being fulfilled, Maya betook 
herself to her father's city, and went to the garden 
which he had dedicated to his Queen Lumbini, and 
as she stood leaning against a certain tree the pains 
of travail came upon her — for the mother of a 
Buddha must bring forth her child standing. Then 
the great god Indra raised a mighty tempest, and 
scaring away all Maya's women, took upon himself 
the disguise of an old midwife, and prepared to re- 
ceive the babe in his arms; but the child, pushing 
the god aside, would have none of him, but by him- 
self took seven steps towards each of the four car- 
dinal points of heaven. 

To the East he said: "I will reach the highest 
Nirvana." 

To the South: "I will be the first of all 
creatures." 



32 Redesdale's Further Memories 

To the West: "This will be my last birth." 

To the North: "I will cross the ocean of 
Existence." 

Many signs and wonders followed. A heavenly 
choir of gods and Yakshas appeared in the sky, 
hovering over the birthplace and singing hymns of 
gladness to celebrate the birth of a Bodhisatva, who 
after years of devotion should one day become 
Buddha and attain supreme wisdom. Two dragons 
came out of the clouds, the one spouting warm 
water, the other cold, and so the god-like babe was 
washed. Moreover, it came to pass that when the 
appointed time for the child to be taken, as was 
the custom among Shakyas, to do homage at the 
shrine of Shakya Vardana, the statue, instead of 
receiving obeisance, bowed down in worship at the 
babe's feet. 

Then the king knew what manner of son this 
was, and he perceived that the soothsayers had 
spoken truth. Of the two alternative futures which 
they had foretold for him, the king would have 
preferred that he should become the monarch of the 
whole world. But the gods knew better. They 
knew that he was to be not the monarch of the 
world, but its freer: the sacrifice and renunciation 
of his life were to strike off from millions the 
shackles of sin and misery. They knew, moreover, 
that all the king's endeavours to turn the Blessed 
One from his purpose would be vain ; yet must the 
king needs try, and so throughout the prince's youth 



Veluvana 33 

every temptation that riches and luxury and pleas- 
ure could offer was put in his way. In the life of 
the Buddha it is easy to separate the wheat from 
the chaff, the facts from the fairy-tales. The great 
central truth remains untarnished in spite of all, 
and so in telling the story we, seeking to show the 
inspiration of Oriental mysticism, need hardly rob 
it of the mystic glamour of that poetical embroidery 
in which the rich imagination of Indian priests has 
enwrapped it. 

Seven days after the birth of her son the beauti- 
ful Queen Maya died, and the babe was given over 
to the care of her younger sister, Prajapati Gau- 
tami, who was also one of King Suddhodana's 
wives. 

It is strange that in his picturesque Buddhist 
poem, "The Light of Asia," Sir Edwin Arnold 
should have omitted many of the legends with 
which he must have been familiar, and which 
would well have fitted the rather sensuous char- 
acter of his verse. Moreover, he mixes up the 
stories of the two wives of Prince Siddartha, 
Yasodhara and Gopa, and altogether omits any 
mention of the birth in the Lumbini Garden. Now 
the Lumbini Garden is one of those places connected 
with the Buddhist records which have been identi- 
fied with the utmost certainty. The early Chinese 
pilgrims were shown the spot, and were careful 
with accuracy to describe the monuments which 
now, after all these centuries, the Babu Chandra 



34 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Mukherji has been able to verify. On the spot 
where stood the sacred tree under which, grasping 
one of its boughs, Maya the Queen gave birth to 
her son, contemporary piety, or perhaps at latest 
that of King Asoka, who lived two hundred years 
afterwards, erected a chapel in which stood a sculp- 
ture portraying the nativity. 

The ruins of the sacred building may yet be seen, 
and, much damaged, the stone image which it en- 
shrined — a barbaric but expressive group. Hard 
by there still runs the little stream which Hsiian 
Chwang tells us was called the "river of oil," a 
name which it still bears. Twenty or twenty-five 
paces from the sacred tree is the tank in which 
Maya bathed, still full of pure water. 

In the days of the Chinese pilgrims there was a 
great stone pillar which had been erected by King 
Asoka; but it had been struck by lightning, and 
lay on the ground when they saw it, split in the 
middle. The pillar with a perfectly preserved in- 
scription by King Asoka stands close to the temple. 
But the most striking proof of all is in the name 
Lumbini, or Lummini, which is preserved to this 
day as Rummin Dei, the initial R of Sanscrit being 
changed into L in the Magadhi language of the 
inscription. 

So he who visits the Rummin Dei to-day knows 
of a certainty that he is standing on the very spot 
where some twenty-five centuries ago Prince Sid- 
dartha was born — he who was to found a religion 



Veluvana 35 

which, above all others, has, so far as numbers go, 
dominated mankind. For his disciples have, indeed, 
been "as the stars of heaven and as the sand which 
is upon the seashore." 

The years went on and the child grew in grace 
and beauty of mind and body. His teachers were 
amazed at the precocity of his knowledge and wis- 
dom. Learning seemed to come to him by instinct, 
until at last one of his masters said to him: "It is 
thou that art the Guru, not I." His stature and 
strength were phenomenal, qualities upon which 
tradition was not slack in embroidering. Was he 
not sixteen, some say eighteen, feet tall, and did he 
not toss a dead elephant over a moat with as great 
ease as an ordinary strong man would fling a cat 
across a ditch ? 

But with all this he was a child of moods. At 
an age when other children are careless of aught 
save their toys and their games, he would lose him- 
self in the solitude of the forests and remain 
wrapped in thought, deep in meditation. The king, 
his father, who watched him narrowly, perceived 
this, and felt that it boded no good for his own 
dynastic ambition. He thought of the prophecy of 
the soothsayers, and had a premonition that his 
son's greatness would be spiritual rather than tem- 
poral. He foresaw that, however much he might 
try to turn the boy's thoughts towards the world, 
his labour would be but vain. 

Still, he would leave no stone unturned to win 



36 Redesdale's Further Memories 

him over by the perfumed softness of Oriental 
luxury to the pomp and pride of his rank. Three 
palaces did he build for him, one for each of the 
three seasons of the year — spring, summer and 
winter — and the plenishing of these was such as 
would appeal to every aesthetic sense. The 
sweetest singers, the daintiest dancers, were en- 
listed to brighten the life of the palaces. But 
against all the spells of the enchantresses the young 
prince, already almost a recluse, was as hard as 
adamant. 

Soon the time came when it was fitting that he 
should take a wife, and upon this the king and his 
councillors based their last hope of turning his 
mind to earthly things. We are told that the prince 
thought long and anxiously before he could assure 
himself that marriage would not engross him to 
such an extent as to rob him of the calm which was 
needful for the contemplation and the search for 
wisdom, to which he was minded to dedicate his life. 

In the end he consented, but he stipulated that 
the wife chosen for him should be no ordinary 
woman, but such a one as might be a spiritual help- 
mate to him. Caste was not to weigh in the scale. 
She might be a Kshatriya, a Vaisiya (householder), 
or even a Sudra (serf). That was of no account. 
The mind alone, or perhaps rather what we should 
call the soul, must be the test. It is difficult to 
imagine the consternation which, if it be true, as it 
probably is, such a declaration on the part of a 



Veluvana 37 

royal prince would arouse among the bigoted Brah- 
mans of his father's court. 

There was, however, no need to fear a degrad- 
ing marriage, for when the maidens of the noble 
Shakya clan were brought together, Yasodhara 
was chosen for her beauty and her sweet nature. 
And greatly blessed the prince was in his choice, 
for she believed in him as Kadi j ah did in Mo- 
hammed during the humble days of his life as 
camel driver, and when after his long self-banish- 
ment in the wilderness, he at last entered upon his 
ministration as Buddha, she with her young son 
Rahula, followed him as a disciple. But many 
years were to pass — years fraught with great hap- 
penings before that should take place. 

It is my misfortune that I have no first-hand 
knowledge derived from the study in the originals 
of those books in which the Buddhist legend is en- 
chased. I am ignorant of Sanscrit, ignorant of 
Pali — as ignorant, indeed, as those holy monks and 
priests who drone out their texts without any spark 
of light as to the meaning of the words which they 
recite by rote. But, after all, I am not attempting 
to write any learned treatise on the religion of 
Buddha, but simply to give some account as best I 
may of the legends which satisfy the spiritual crav- 
ings of millions of those people among whom I have 
spent several years of my life — legends which have 
inspired the art of the Far East just as our own 
beautiful religion has inspired that of the West, and 



38 Redesdale's Further Memories 

which for old sake's sake, I have tried to represent 
in my own Veluvana. 

And so I have to cull from a whole garden of 
books written by French and English scholars what 
flowers I can, trying to weld together into some 
harmony of story their many dissonances. The 
chief difficulty begins with the tales of the marriage 
or marriages of Prince Siddartha. Not Sir Edwin 
Arnold alone is responsible for the tangled skein 
which we have to unravel. Barthelemy St. Hilaire, 
Rhys Davids, Rockhill, Beal, and many others, have 
each of them their own version of the traditional 
events. With fairy-tales that is inevitable, but the 
salient facts of truth remain, and these are the 
same in all the books. 

On the day of Prince Siddartha's birth there had 
appeared a mystic tree, which was called "The Es- 
sence of Virtue." When the prince was twenty 
years old this tree was blown down and dammed 
the water which supplied Devadeha, which was the 
city of King Suprabuddha. In vain did the people 
try to remove it; but Chandaka, the prince's chari- 
oteer, drove him out to a certain garden whence 
he could hear the cries of the people, and he was 
about to go to their help when a wounded wild 
goose, the Hansa of Indian myth, fell at his feet. 

The prince took it up and tended it and bound 
up the wound. Now the goose had been shot by 
his kinsman Devadatta, and this was the beginning 
of a great enmity between them. For Devadatta 



Veluvana 39 

sent a messenger to the prince to demand the bird 
of him, claiming it as the prize of his bow; but 
the prince would not yield it up, saying that the 
bird belonged to him who had saved its life rather 
than to him who would fain have taken it. From 
that time forth Devadatta hated him, and appears 
throughout the whole story of the Buddha's life, 
and even in what are known as the "Birth Stories" 
of previous existences, as his bitter enemy. 

Then the Prince left the garden, and seizing the 
tree which had defied all the strength of the people, 
threw it into the air so that it broke in two, the 
halves falling on the two different sides of the 
stream. As, after having performed this feat, he 
was returning home, he saw a beautiful maiden who 
was looking out from the terrace in front of her 
father's house. The prince stopped his chariot and 
a great love sprang up between the two. The dam- 
sel was Gopa, the daughter of Dandapani, a noble 
of the Shakya clan. 

When King Siddhodana heard what had hap- 
pened, he was overjoyed, and asked the father for 
the maid as a bride for his son. But Dandapani 
scorned Siddartha as a dreamer of dreams. The 
Kshatriya was like the samurai of Japan, whose 
sword is his soul, and full of this spirit he declared 
that it would bring shame upon a warrior were he 
to give his daughter in marriage to one who cared 
not a jot for those manly sports and contests which 
beseemed a Kshatriya, but spent his time in idle 



40 Redesdale's Further Memories 

thought and vain imaginings. If he wanted Gopa, 
let him prove his mettle; let him fight for her and 
win her against all comers. So a great tourney 
was held, of which Gopa was to be the prize. 

The Prince and his two kinsmen, Ananda, who 
loved him and afterwards became his disciple, and 
Devadatta, the betrayer, with all the young braves 
of the clan, entered the lists. But it mattered little 
who opposed him ; none could hold his own against 
Prince Siddartha. Disputing with the most 
learned Gurus, he was always the conqueror. In 
manly exercises, horsemanship, wrestling, archery, 
and many other sports, he defeated all rivals. He 
alone could bend the mystic bow of the ancient 
Shakyas, and when he shot an arrow into the air 
and it fell to earth, from that spot there sprang a 
jet of healing water, which to this day is shown as 
the Arrow Fountain. And so Gopa fell a willing 
prize to the bow and spear of the king's son whom 
she loved. But Devadatta, beaten at all points, went 
his way more than ever bearing hatred and jealousy 
in his heart. 

In spite of all the charms and gentle goodness of 
his wives, in spite of the arts and graces of the sing- 
ing and dancing girls of his palaces, Prince Sid- 
dartha was haunted by pity for the world's sin and 
sorrow, which he divined but which he had not 
yet seen face to face. The king had been very care- 
ful that all ugly and disquieting sights should be 
kept out of his way. But it was all in vain ; sooner 



Veluvana 41 

or later the revelation must needs come. The four 
famous drives furnished the certainty. It hap- 
pened that once, when he was in his chariot with 
Chandana, his charioteer, on their way to the Lum- 
bini Garden, before coming to the city gate, they 
met a man bowed, decrepit, toothless, white-haired, 
tottering feebly with the help of a stick, stumbling 
at every step. The prince asked Chandana what 
this meant, and Chandana explained to him the 
misery of old age. Sadly he turned back, unwilling 
to go further. Another time they met a leper 
stricken with foul disease; a third time they were 
met by wailings and lamentation, men carrying a 
bier, women weeping and beating their breasts. 
This was death. Yet once again they drove out, 
and this time they met a bikshu — a pious mendicant 
— with his alms-bowl. Poor, indeed, he was and 
ragged, but in his face was written the calm of holy 
happiness. 

Then Prince Siddartha knew that he had found 
his callmg. "Vanity of vanities," said the Jewish 
preacher some four hundred years before Buddha's 
time, "all is vanity." It was in the spirit of King 
Solomon that the Prince went to his father and 
prayed to be relieved of all the pomp and burthen 
of royal state and to be allowed to fly the world in 
quest of wisdom. But the King would not listen to 
him, and, on the contrary, caused the gates of Ka- 
pilavastu to be closely guarded lest by any chance 
his son should try to escape. 



42 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Let me insert here a wonderful coincidence. At 
the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth 
centuries of our era there lived in the monastery of 
Marsaba, that wonderful laura in the wilderness 
of Judaea, a monk of great piety and learning, St. 
John of Damascus, the greatest ecclesiastical writer 
of his age, and so eloquent a preacher that, like 
another John, the famous Patriarch of Constanti- 
nople, he was known as Chrysostom, the golden- 
mouthed, or Chrysorrhoas, gold-flowing. What, it 
will be asked, has this Syrian monk to do with 
Prince Siddartha and the four drives? Listen! 

Amongst the many books which St. John of 
Damascus wrote, or is supposed to have written, 
is the story of Barlaam and Josaphat. St. John 
said that he received it from travellers coming 
from India, and so firmly did he believe in its truth, 
that at the end of the story he appealed to the two 
saints for their intercession on his behalf. 

Max Miiller sums up the tale as follows : "A king 
in India, an enemy and persecutor of the Christians, 
has an only son. The astrologers have predicted 
that he will embrace the new doctrine. His father, 
therefore, tries by all means to keep him ignorant 
of the miseries of the world, and to create in him a 
taste for pleasure and enjoyment. A Christian her- 
mit, however, gains access to this prince, and in- 
structs him in the doctrines of the Christian relig- 
ion. The young prince is not only baptized, but 
resolves to give up all his earthly riches ; and, after 



Veluvana 43 

having converted his own father and many of his 
subjects, he follows his teacher into the desert."* 

But that is not all. In the story of Josaphat, as 
told by St. John, we have also the tale of the drives 
— with this distinction: Whereas the Buddhist 
canon, the Lalita Vistara, represents Buddha as 
seeing on three succesive drives, first an old, then 
a sick, and at last a dying man, St. John makes 
Josaphat meet two men on his first drive, one 
maimed, the other blind, and an old man who is 
nearly dying on the second drive. That is but a 
slight difference which would be accounted for by 
oral tradition. The coincidence is striking, and has 
been pointed out independently by English, French 
and German scholars; and, as Max Mtiller says, it 
is "as clear as daylight" that "Joannes Damascenus 
took the principal character of his religious novel 
from the Lalita Vistara." The first European 
scholar to notice this was M. Laboulaye. 

And now comes the strangest part of the story. 
So popular did St. John's tale become, that it was 
translated into every European language. Bar- 
laam and Josaphat were canonized both in the East- 
ern and Western Churches. In the Greek Church 
the 26th of August is their saints' day, in the West- 
ern church the 27th of November. "If all that is 
human and personal in the life of St. Josaphat is 
taken from the Lalita Vistara, what follows? It 
follows . . . that Josaphat is the Buddha of the 

♦Max MiiUer, "Chips from a German Workshop," IX., 178. 



44 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Buddhist canon. It follows that Buddha has be- 
come a saint in the Roman Church ; it follows that, 
though under a different name, the sage of Kapila- 
vastu, the founder of a religion which, whatever 
we may think of its dogma, is in the purity of its 
morals nearer to Christianity than any other re- 
ligion, and which counts even now, after an exist- 
ence of 2,400 years, 455,000,000 of believers, has 
received the highest honours that the Christian 
Church can bestow. And whatever we may think 
of the sanctity of saints, let those who doubt the 
right of Buddha to a place among them read the 
story of his life in the Buddhist canon. If he lived 
the life that is there described, few saints have a 
better claim to the title than Buddha; and no one, 
either in the Greek or Roman Church, need be 
ashamed of having paid to Buddha's memory the 
honour that was intended for St. Josaphat, the 
prince, the hermit, and the saint."* 

One night, when the palace was hushed in sleep, 
the prince roused his faithful charioteer Chandana, 
and bade him to saddle his horse Kantaka and pre- 
pare to follow him. He passed through the many 
halls where the women, beautiful and graceful by 
day, were lying asleep in careless and ugly attitudes. 
It was the reverse of the medal, the repulsive side 
of luxury, and the sight filled him with loathing. 
Accompanied by Chandana, he left the palace and 
entered the slumbering streets of the city. By a 

* Max Miiller, ut supra. 



Veluvana 45 

miracle they cheated the watchfulness of the guard 
at the gate and rode out into the open country. 
When they had gone some way the prince took off 
all his jewels and sent Chandana back with injunc- 
tions to give them to Prajapati Gautami, who had 
been a mother to him when her sister Maya died. 
Then he went on alone into the wilderness. By the 
way he met a hunter, with whom he exchanged his 
stately attire for rough countryman's clothes, and 
in this fashion entered upon the six years of an as- 
ceticism such as the world has perhaps never seen. 
In his loneliness five men came and joined him as his 
disciples, sharing the hardships of his self-imposed 
penance. 

At the end of those six long years of starvation 
and wretchedness and mortification of the flesh, 
when the Blessed One, resisting all the temptations 
of Mara, the evil spirit, and his three beautiful 
daughters, had reduced his body to a mere shadow, 
there came a moment when it was revealed to him 
that not by asceticism alone could he hope to attain 
his goal. Not in that way could he destroy the 
power and misery of sin. He determined to go back 
to the world, not, indeed, as a warrior-prince, a 
mighty conqueror, but as a poor and humble 
teacher, striving to bring help and virtue to his 
fellowmen. A young village maiden, whose name 
was Sujata, took pity upon his abject state, and 
brought him bowls of sweet milk to comfort him and 
restore his wasted strength. Naturally enough, 



46 Redesdale's Further Memories 

legend worked upon this pretty idyll, telling how 
Sujata milked a thousand cows, and "with their 
milk fed five hundred cows, with theirs two hundred 
and fifty, and so on down to eight. Thus aspiring 
after quantity and sweetness, she did what is called 
working the milk in." Then she boiled the milk of 
the eight cows, and, to the accompaniment of many 
miracles, fed the Buddha with this restoring es- 
sence of milk. (Rhys Davids, "Birth Stories," Vol. 
I., page 91, etc.) But his five friends, angry with 
him for leaving the ascetic life, turned away from 
him as a renegade and left him. 

So the Blessed One departed out of the wilder- 
ness and came to Rajagriha and entered the Mriga- 
deva, the deer forest, hard by the city. There for 
seven days and nights he sat in meditation under the 
Bo tree (Ficus religiosa), until at the end of that 
time he became conscious that he had attained the 
supreme wisdom and was now Buddha. Under 
that tree he preached the first sermon, and the five 
friends who had deserted him were converted and 
came back. Countless numbers of people from 
the king of that country, Bimbisara, downwards, 
flocked to listen to his teaching. Among others 
came his own wife Yasodhara, bearing him no 
grudge for having left her, and bringing her young 
son Rahula. By that name there hangs a tale. 
When it was told to the Blessed One that a son had 
been born to him, he answered: "There has been 
born to me an impediment." This answer was re- 



Veluvana 47 

peated to King Suddhodana, and he said, "Let the 
boy be called Rahula, The Impediment." 

When the king heard that his grandson and his 
mother had gone to follow in the wake of the 
Buddha, he was sorely grieved. His son had left 
him. Eight messengers whom he had sent begging 
him to return had failed in their mission, and them- 
selves remained as disciples with the Blessed One; 
and now he had but this child to look to for the per- 
petuation of his name and of his dynasty. Blind 
— and no wonder, for who can read the future? — 
he could not see that this son of his would win for 
himself and for his father a name beside which all 
the glory and pride of their Heaven-born ancestors 
would be but a cloud dispelled by the first ray of 
morning sun. Three influences have ruled the 
spirits of men since the dawn of the world — 
Buddha, Mohammed and One other, the greatest of 
the three. But that other was God. 

What would have been the winning of one or 
more provinces, what the slaughter of a few hun- 
dreds or even thousands of bowmen and spearmen, 
compared with the conquest of the souls of billions 
of fellow-creatures through the length and breadth 
of Asia? The old king's name lives, but it lives as 
that of the father of no warrior, but of a great 
teacher whose doctrine has given peace and happi- 
ness to the souls of men instead of shedding the 
blood which clogs the footsteps of the earthly con- 
queror. 



48 Redesdale's Further Memories 

We, holding fast the Christian creed, may say 
with confidence that of all mere men who have lived 
since the creation of the world Buddha was the 
greatest. Next to him, I should count Confucius, 
and after Confucius, Mohammed. 

Nothing in Buddha's life seems to me greater 
than the victory which he achieved over himself 
when he became convinced of the aimlessness of 
the ascetic life. He had left his palaces, his wife, 
and all the pomp of his father's court, in order 
to fly from the world and its temptations and lead 
a life of privation and meditation. After six years 
he saw the futility of such a life. His aim was to 
do something that should redeem the world from 
sin and its miseries. How could solitude, starva- 
tion and mere meditation achieve that ? 

So, in spite of the indignation of the five men 
who had followed him into the ascetic life, he de- 
termined to go back into the world and live for the 
good of others instead of sitting wrapped in his own 
thoughts. He believed that he had achieved the 
great good, and he realized the fact that his atti- 
tude was one of utter selfishness, barren of all re- 
sult, and leading to nothing. The disappointment 
and the desertion of his five followers must have 
been bitter. But comfort came to him in time, for 
they grew to know that he was right and were con- 
verted as trusty disciples to his new creed. From 
the time that he left the shade of the Bodhi tree his 
ministration began. He knew that he had received 



Veluvana 49 

the sublime gift of wisdom, and that the gift was 
not for himself alone, but for the purification and 
happiness of all mankind. It was no doubt a great 
struggle to give up the illusion of six long years 
and the dream of many more. But it was also a 
great triumph, the turning-point of a life that was 
so full of destiny. 

I have already told how the first Vihara was es- 
tablished in the Veluvana, the pious gift of King 
Bimbisara, but the chief home of the Buddha was 
another garden or grove called the Jetavana, which 
a certain minister named Anatha Pindaka had 
bought at a great price from Jeta, the son of the 
King of Sravasti. Here the Buddha dwelt for more 
than twenty years, and there he uttered the Jatakas, 
or Birth Stories, which have been preserved mainly 
thanks to his kinsman Ananda. For it is a strange 
coincidence that, as in Christianity so in Buddhism, 
there is no written word by the Master. These 
Jatakas are of the nature of parables by which the 
Buddha was wont to illustrate the events of the 
present by stories of what had taken place in a 
former state of existence; and as the Buddha's life 
was one long struggle against the treacherous de- 
signs of his enemy Devadatta, so in the Jatakas we 
find a constant reference to the feud as having 
existed in previous incarnations. 

When first the Buddha began to preach, women 
were not admitted into the Holy Order; but there 
soon came a moment when they, too, yearned to 



50 Redesdale's Further Memories 

listen to the teachings of the master. A certain noble 
of the Shakya clan took his wife and a number of 
Shakya ladies to sit at the feet of the Blessed One. 
Among them it is to be inferred were Gopa and 
others of the Buddha's wives. But Yasodhara was 
not among the very first, for she still longed for her 
lost husband, and hoped against hope that he might 
yet come back to her. But when she saw that this 
could not be, she, too, was converted and became a 
saint, earning the praise of the Blessed One for her 
modesty and virtue. 

Now Devadatta, seeing the great power of the 
Tathageta (Buddha), had, against his will, for it 
would deprive him of all chance of sovereignty, be- 
come a Bhikshu, and carrying the beggar's bowl, 
had set up a Vihara in rivalry to that of the Buddha. 
He, too, must needs convert disciples, both men and 
women. It chanced that among the latter there was 
a young married woman, who, though she knew it 
not, was with child when she joined the sisterhood. 
When she discovered how matters stood with her, 
she made no attempt at concealment, but told her 
superiors of her case. Upon report being made of 
this to Devadatta, he was wroth, and declared that 
as she had broken her vows she must be disgraced 
and banished from the community. In shame and 
sorrow she came to the Blessed One and laid her 
case before him. 

He was moved with pity, but saw that it would 
do harm to the Holy Order and give offence to the 



Veluvana 51 

weaker brethren and sisters if he were to admit a 
nun who had been rejected as unchaste by Deva- 
datta, unless she could prove her innocence. So he 
ordered that an inquiry should be made, and upon 
the assurance of a wise woman, named Visakha, that 
the girl's condition was not due to any violation of 
the rules of the order, but was only the natural 
result of her marriage before she entered the sister- 
hood, he accepted her, and when the nun's child was 
born, he was known as Kassapa the Prince, and was 
brought up in royal state. The Master justified his 
action by the story told in the following Jataka, 
which is given at great length by Rhys Davids. 

Long ages ago the Bodhisatva came to life as a 
deer. When he was born he was of a golden colour, 
his eyes were like round jewels, his horns were 
white as silver, his mouth was red as a cluster of 
Kamala flowers, his hoofs were bright and hard as 
lacquer-work, his tail as fine as the tail of a Tibetan 
ox, and his body as large as a foal's. He was 
known as the Banyan deer, and lived in a forest with 
an attendant herd of five hundred deer, over which 
he was king. Near him dwelt another deer, also 
gold-coloured, with a like herd of deer under him. 
He was known as the Monkey deer. 

Now the King of Benares at that time was a 
mighty hunter, and made his people neglect their 
work in order to go and beat for him. So the peo- 
ple took counsel together, and resolved to make an 
enclosure, driving all the deer into it and giving 



52 Redesdale's Further Memories 

them over to the king, so that their work should be 
no longer hindered. So the two herds were driven 
into the inclosure, and when the king went there, 
he saw the two gold-coloured deer and granted them 
their lives. But he, loving venison, would go some- 
times to shoot a deer and at other times sent his 
cook to kill one. At last, when the deer, terrified 
and often wounded, were in despair, they went to 
the Bodhisatva and told him of their piteous case. 
So he made a bargain with the king of the other 
herd — the Monkey King — that the two herds 
should in turn each day by lot send a deer to the 
place of execution, so that at the least there should 
be no more wounding. 

One day it happened the lot fell upon a hind in 
the herd of the Monkey deer. But she being great 
with young, went to the Monkey deer and said: 
"Lord! I am with young. When I have brought 
forth my son, we will both take our turn. Order 
that the turn shall pass me by." But the Monkey 
deer refused, saying that he could not make her lot 
fall upon others, and sent her away. 

Seeing that there was no help in him, she ap- 
pealed to the Bodhisatva, and he took pity upon her, 
and went himself and put his neck upon the block 
of execution and lay down. When the cook came 
and saw that the king of the deer whose life had 
been promised him was there, he went and told the 
king, who, seeing the Bodhisatva, said : "My friend, 
the king of the deer! Did I not grant you your 



Veluvana 53 

life? Why are you here?" The Bodhisatva 
answered : "O great king! A hind with young came 
and told me that the lot had fallen upon her. How 
could I transfer her miserable lot to another? So 
I, giving my life for hers, am lying here. Have no 
suspicion, O mighty king!" Then was the king 
moved to great compassion, and saying that never, 
even among men, had he seen so great pity, gave 
their lives both to him and to the hind. But more 
than that, after listening to the Bodhisatva, he de- 
creed that no beasts or birds or fish should thence- 
forth be killed. 

After that, the deer, sure of their lives, began to 
lay waste and eat the crops of the people, so they 
complained to the king, who bade them begone, for 
he might give up his kingdom, but not his oath. 
Then the Banyan deer called together the herds 
and forbade them to eat the crops; and he sent a 
message to the husbandmen, telling them that they 
need put up no fences, but that it would be enough 
if they tied leaves round the edge of the fields as a 
sign. But he continued to instruct the deer thus 
throughout his life, and passed away with his herd 
according to their deeds. The king also hearkened 
to the words of the Bodhisatva, and then in due 
time passed away according to his deeds. 

When the Master had finished this story of the 
Banyan deer he explained its meaning to the assem- 
bled disciples. 

"He who then ruled the Monkey deer was Deva- 



54 Redesdale's Further Memories 

datta, his herd was Devadatta's following, the hind 
was the Nun, her son was Kassapa the Prince, the 
king was Ananda, but the royal Banyan deer was 
myself." Rhys Davids, "Birth Stories," Vol. I., 
pages 20 1 -2 1 o.) 

Purged of its wild extravagances, the Lalita Vis- 
tara, the story told by Ananda, gives much insight 
into the purity and sweet reasonableness of the 
Blessed One's teachings. Shortly before descend- 
ing upon earth to be born of Queen Maya, he is 
seated in the Tsushita (Heaven) surrounded by 
gods and saints, to whom he delivers this last part- 
ing message (I am translating from the version of 
Foucaux, quoted by Barthelemy St. Hilaire) : 

"Be careful to avoid all immodesty. All the 
divine and pure pleasures are the fruit of good 
work. Take heed, then, of your deeds. If you 
have not laid up for yourselves these previous vir- 
tues, you are hurrying to that goal where, far from 
happiness, we experience misery and suffer every 
ill. Desire is neither lasting nor consistent; it is 
even as a dream, a mirage, the lightning, the foam 
of the sea. Observe the practice of the Law; the 
man who faithfully observes these holy practices 
meets with no evil. Loving tradition, morality and 
charity, be constant in patience and purity. Act in 
a spirit of mutual loving-kindness, in a spirit of 
helpfulness. Remember the Buddha, the Law and 
the congregation of the faithful. All that you see 
in me of supernatural power, of science, and of 



Veluvana 55 

strength is produced by the agency of virtue, which 
is its cause, and comes from tradition, from moral- 
ity and from modesty. Do you, too, practise this 
perfect restraint. It is not by phrases, nor by 
words, nor by crying that we can attain the doctrine 
of virtue. Acquire it by deeds; act according to 
your professions; never cease in making efforts. 
Not every one who acts is rewarded, but whoso 
does not act obtains nothing. Beware of pride, of 
haughtiness, and of arrogance; always gentle, and 
never straying from the straight path, be diligent 
in following the road which leads to Nirvana. Be- 
stir yourselves in the search after the Road of Sal- 
vation, and with the lamp of wisdom dispel utterly 
the darkness of ignorance. Rid yourselves of the 
net of sin which is accompanied by repentance. 
But what skills it to say more? The Law is full 
of reason and of purity. When I shall have ob- 
tained the supreme intelligence, when the rain of 
the Law which leads to immortality shall fall, then 
come back to listen anew to the Law which I shall 
teach you." 

Then were the Gods consumed by sorrow at the 
loss of the Blessed One ; but he comforted them by 
leaving in his place the Bodhisatva Maitriya, whom 
he consecrated by giving him his tiara and his dia- 
dem. Maitriya, then, will become Buddha (vide 
supra), when the corrupted world shall have lost 
all memory of the teaching of Shakya Muni. 



56 Redesdale's Further Memories 

The Buddha's life upon earth was prolonged far 
beyond the span which is allotted to most men. He 
was some thirty years old when he first began to 
preach, and his ministration lasted fifty-three years. 
Surely it is not irreverent to apply to him the words 
of the Hebrew Psalmist: "Mark the perfect man 
and behold the upright: for the end of that man 
is peace." Render "Peace" by "Nirvana," no bad 
translation, indeed, and you have the Buddha. 
When at the last he felt that the dark mystery of 
death was overshadowing him, and that the end was 
at hand, he bade Ananda go and tell the Mallas of 
Kusinara that their master would pass away at 
midnight, and invited them to come to him. There 
was at that time in Kusinara an old and decrepit 
man a hundred and twenty years of age, upon whom 
the people looked as a saint. His name was Sub- 
hadra. This venerable man, believing in the great- 
ness of the Blessed One, begged of him the boon of 
passing away before him; and, this being granted, 
Subhadra gave up the ghost. But when the assem- 
bled Bhikshus, being astonished at this favour, in- 
quired the reason, the Blessed One told two last 
Birth Stories. 

Bhikshus, in days gone by there lived in a valley 
a deer, the master of a thousand deer ; he was pru- 
dent, wide-awake and of quick perception. One 
day a hunter espied him and told the king. So the 
king assembled his army and surrounded all the 
deer and their leader. Then the leader thought : "If 



Veluvana 57 

I do not protect these deer they will all be de- 
stroyed." So looking about the place in which they 
were penned, he perceived a torrent flowing 
through the valley ; but the stream was so swift that 
the deer feared lest it should carry them away. But 
the leader jumped into the water, and finding foot- 
hold in the middle, cried to the herd : "Come, jump 
from the bank on to my back and thence to the other 
bank; it is the only means of saving your lives; if 
you do not do this you will surely die!" The herd 
of deer obeyed, and though their hoofs striking 
his back cut the skin and tore the flesh, he never 
flinched. When as it seemed all the deer had 
crossed the water, he looked back, and saw a calf 
that had been left behind and could not cross over. 
Then, torn and bruised and racked with pain, he 
took the calf on his back, and crossed the stream 
with it. All the herd had now passed over, but the 
great stag knew that death was near, and he cried : 
"May what I have done to preserve the joy of life 
to these deer and this calf make me cast off sin, and 
obtain boundless and perfect light; may I become 
a Buddha, cross over the sea of regeneration to 
perfection and salvation, and pass beyond all 
sorrow." . . . 

"What think ye, Bhikshus? I am he who was 
then the leader of the herd. The deer are now the 
five hundred Mallas and the fawn is Subhadra." 
(Adapted from Rockhill's "Life of Buddha," page 
137 et seq.) 



58 Redesdale's Further Memories 

One more Jataka he uttered, and that was the 
last. He warned his weeping disciples not to mourn 
for him, or to look upon him as lost, for inasmuch 
as they had his law and his doctrine, he would still 
be with them. He spoke to them of the four places 
where pious men would rear monuments in his 
honour: (i) The Lumbini Garden, where he was 
born; (2) the place under the Sacred Fig-tree, 
where he became Buddha; (3) the Mrighadeva, the 
deer forest, from where the first sermon was 
preached; (4) the place where he died at Kushinara. 

At the last the Blessed One, uncovering his body, 
said to the Bhikshus: "Brethren, look well at the 
Tathagata's body, for it is as hard to find a Tatha- 
gata as to see a flower on a fig-tree. Bhikshus! 
never forget it: decay is inherent to all things!" 
These were the last words of the Tathagata. And 
so in the fullness of time, calm and holy, he entered 
Nirvana, that state in which all the desires, all the 
cares and all the sorrows of life have ceased to be. 
Is not that the ideal of "Peace, perfect peace?" 

There is a Japanese proverb which says : "Meet- 
ing is the beginning of parting." Pregnant, indeed, 
are those six words, for in them are summed up all 
the sorrows and the one inevitable certainty of life. 
When the parting with those who are dear to us 
takes place, how we treasure some trifle which 
brings to life recollections of the sweet communion 
of the past ! And so it is with those relics of which 



Veluvana 59 

I spoke at the beginning of this chapter. When 
Assheton Smith, the famous sportsman, was told 
that he must take his ailing wife to the South of 
France, he, being a wealthy man, answered : "That 
I cannot do, but I can and will bring the South of 
France to her." And so there arose that marvellous 
conservatory, a glass palace, which I remember 
well, when nearly sixty years ago I used to go and 
stay with Lord Broughton, Byron's friend, who 
rented the place. In our humble way we bring home 
to ourselves the lands endeared to us by the careless 
gaiety of former days, scenes which are peopled by 
the ghosts of old friends whom we conjure up, liv- 
ing once more in the sunshine of happy youth. Is 
not that the chief sanity of the collector's madness ? 



CHAPTER II 

Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi and Caste 
— The Aryans 

THERE are few days in the year, even in 
mid-winter, or, what is worse still, in 
March, when I cannot sit out in my Velu- 
vana, a sun-trap snugly sheltered from the north 
and the biting east. It is my thinking-place, and on 
this 28th of January, for some mysterious reason, 
with his image before me, my thoughts have been 
held entirely by the Buddha himself. Not that I am 
a Buddhist, or in the remotest degree likely to be- 
come one, though we hear of convinced followers 
of that religion even among Englishmen; but, as 
those who condescend to read me will have guessed, 
the story of his life has a great attraction for me, 
and that none the less because it is the record of 
one of the greatest rebellions that ever took place. 
Indeed, there is something weirdly fascinating in 
the history of all revolution even where we most 
hate it. What show-place can possess greater in- 
terest than the tragic collections of the Musee Car- 
navalet in what was once Madame de Sevigne's 
home in Paris? Yet it is made up of relics which 
make men shudder, especially those few still left 

60 




ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI PREACHING TO THE BIRDS 
By Giotto 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 61 

who, like myself, long ago knew not a few people 
who had lived through the days of the Terreur. 

I have stood in that house of gruesome memories 
spellbound by a fascination such as that by which a 
snake paralyses its victim. In quite another way I 
am entranced by the upheaval which was the work 
of the Buddha. There was not the faintest likeness 
between the two revolutions — indeed, they were 
diametrically opposites. The one all fury, flame 
and murder — hatred, the guillotine, and the noyades 
of the Loire. The other, the calm extinction of all 
passion, all human desire, all ambition ; a life spent 
in holy contemplation and in the wooing of that 
supreme wisdom which is virtue. 

And yet Martin Luther himself, when he pas- 
sionately scourged the Pope and his Bishop for the 
sale of indulgences, was not a more zealous rebel 
than this calm and contemplative Buddha, who, re- 
nouncing all honours and titles and worldly posses- 
sions for himself, contented, like St. Francis, to don 
the monk's robe and to carry the beggar's bowl, en- 
tered his peaceful protest against the usurpations 
and pretentions of the crafty Brahmans, who had 
long since drifted away from the simple and poet- 
ically beautiful teaching of the Rig Veda, albeit they 
acknowledged its authority as Sruti — inspiration, 
looking upon it as their one inspired sacred Book.* 
In that wonderful collection of hymns and prayers 

* Even the famous Laws of Manu were only held to be Smriti — 
tradition. 



62^ Redesdale's Further Memories 

about which I wish to say a few words later there is 
no allusion to suttee — the awful institution under 
which widows are burnt with their dead husbands ; 
none to child-marriages, another cruelty; none to 
caste. All of these were inventions of the Brah- 
mans, and it was upon the doctrine of caste that 
they founded their claim to superiority over the 
kings and princes whom they had gradually sup- 
planted. 

So long as the king and priest were one — so long, 
that is to say, as the king conducted the ceremonies 
and sacrifices of religion — the authority of the king 
was unchallenged.* But there came a moment 
when the kings grew weary of a tedious ritual and 
delegated their religious duties to substitutes. That 
was the opportunity of the priestcraft, who, as the 
intercessors between the people and their gods — a 
powerful position indeed — were able to claim a rank 
higher than that of the king himself. Here was the 
beginning of Caste. When Buddha entered upon 
his ministry there were four castes : ( I ) The Brah- 
mans, or priests; (2) the Kshatriya, the warrior 
and governing class, to which the kings and princes 
belonged — a class analogous to the Samurai or 
Bushi of Japan; (3) the Vaisyas — farmers, traders, 
etc. These three classes, all of Aryan descent, 
were, and are, "the twiceborn," whose second birth 
is symbolized by their being invested with the 
sacred cord at an age which more or less corre- 

* See Max Miiller's "Ancient Sanskrit Literature," pp. 57 and 80. 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 63 

sponds to that of confirmation with us. (4) The 
Sudras were the fourth class ; they were the lowest 
of all — despised as the descendants of the Dasyu, 
the enemies of the bright gods, the aborigines who 
were defeated by the migration of the white Aryan 
herdsmen descending upon India from the lofty 
plains of the Pamirs. 

We talk glibly enough of Caste, yet there are not 
many of us who have any glimmering of light as to 
its real meaning or origin. The majority of Eu- 
ropeans speak of the word as if it were of Hindu 
origin, whereas it is simply a Portuguese word sig- 
nifying race or family. In its present sense, indeed, 
it is of quite modern birth, for the old Portuguese 
Barbosa, writing in the sixteenth century, only uses 
the word casta in the sense of family, speaking of 
men and women de boa casta, of good family. 
When he wished to indicate the mysterious divisions 
of Indian society, he used the word leis, laws, lets 
de gentios, laws of the heathen. (Sir Henry Yule's 
glossary.) Apart from the word, we are apt to 
speak of Caste as if it were an institution, respect- 
able at any rate on account of its hoary antiquity. 
Old it certainly is, yet it was not known to the sacred 
poets of the Rig Veda. 

The word which comes nearest to caste in Sans- 
krit is "Varna" (colour), and in the early days of 
the Aryan invasion of India there were only two 
classes : the white conquerors and the "Dasyu," or 
enemies, who were black, and, as the conquered 



64 Redesdale's Further Memories 

people, looked down upon. What we call caste, 
then, which was originally a question of skin, had 
already in the Buddha's time, five centuries before 
our era, become far more complicated than that. 
Ethnologically, the division between the white man 
and the black, the Arya and the Dasyu, the con- 
queror and the conquered, was as sharp as ever. 
But whereas the dark man remained as he was — 
the lowest of the castes — political reasons and the 
lust of power had subdivided the conquering race 
into three distinct classes, and, as I have said above, 
it was upon that subdivision that the Brahmans 
laid the "precious corner-stone" of their priestly 
tyranny. 

When the glorious young prince, a Kshatriya 
and the heir to the throne, the incomparable scholar 
and athlete, the man whom men envied and women 
loved, cast aside his royal rank and went forth into 
the wilderness, taking upon himself all the burthens 
and privations of the poorest and meanest, in order 
that for them he might work, striving for the good 
of all mankind without distinction of colour or race, 
the Brahmans were forced to see in him a hostile 
champion, armed to attack their stronghold. He 
went further than this : he denied the divine author- 
ity of the Veda, without which the whole structure 
of Brahmanism crumbles to dust, and so he finally 
was branded as a heretic. 

What cannot fail to excite surprise is the fact 
that although Buddhism "became the state religion 




PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 

After a photograph by Elliott and Fry, London 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 65 

of India under Asoka, the Constantine of India, in 
the middle of the third century B.C." (Max Miil- 
ler), and was only declining in the seventh century 
a. d., caste should not utterly have disappeared. But 
that was not the case — on the contrary, it has be- 
come more and more involved, for there are now 
not only the three divisions of the twice-born Aryas, 
and the outcast Sudras, but there are, moreover, the 
subdivisions to which professions and occupations 
have given rise; the goldsmith, for example, look- 
ing down upon the bootmaker and leather worker, 
and he, in his turn, refusing to hold communion 
with some craftsman whose superior he deems him- 
self to be. No wonder caste has been described as 
"a standing puzzle to governors and the despair of 
all employers of labour." Life is, indeed, compli- 
cated when the shadow of a man of meaner birth 
falling upon a boiling pot denies the food which it 
contains by an impurity which is almost worse than 
poison. As in an Oriental household, perhaps even 
in a European household, it has been said that no 
matter how low a menial may be, there is always 
someone a step lower to whom by payment he may 
assign some of his duties; so below the Sudras 
there is the Pariah, the outcast, who, as the word 
implies, should carry a bell to give timely warning 
of the approaching contamination of his shadow. 

Max Miiller, in his "Chips from a German Work- 
shop," quotes a table by Berghaus showing the rela- 
tive numbers of the people professing the chief re- 



66 Redesdale's Further Memories 

ligions into which the world is divided. Nothing 
can better show the extent of the influence which 
Buddhism, with an advantage of 500 years and 
more over Christianity, 1,100, and more, over 
Mohammedanism, has exercised upon mankind. 

Buddhists 31.2 

Christians 30.7 

Mohammedans 15.7 

Brahmanists 13.4 

Various heathens 8.7 

Jews 0.3 

In a note, Max Miiller adds that : "As Berghaus 
does not distinguish the Buddhists in China from 
the following of Confucius and Lao Tze, the first 
place on the scale belongs really to Christianity. It 
is difficult in China to say to what religion a man 
belongs, as the same person may profess two or 
three. The Emperor himself, after sacrificing to 
the ritual of Confucius, visits a Tao-ssu Temple, 
and afterwards bows before an image of Fo in a 
Buddhist chapel." 

Ex Oriente lux. We see from this table that all 
the chief religions of the world have their rise, like 
the sun, in the East. 

I have observed with no little astonishment that 
certain pundits of to-day speak in somewhat offen- 
sively patronizing tones of Max Miiller, as if he 
were a thing of the past, all very well in his day, 
but not up to date, and already superseded. As to 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 67 

that, whether his theories upon the subject of myth- 
ology and comparative religion were sound or not, 
I am not competent to judge ; but I feel that if others 
have pushed his work a step further than the point 
at which he left it, we may fairly ask whether, with- 
out his great labours, these sages would have at- 
tained their own success. There is no finality in 
science, and a Newton or a Faraday is in no way 
dethroned if others have built on the foundations 
which he laid. The world does not stand still, and 
it is the common fate of the pioneer that some new 
man should go beyond what he has reached. How- 
ever that may be, the collating, translating and 
editing of the sacred books of India, and the editing 
of the thirty volumes of the sacred books of the 
East, including Chinese and Arabic works, were a 
colossal labour — the work of a lifetime, which has 
been of national and international value. All 
honour to the workman ! 

I first met Max Mtiller sixty years ago at the 
Deanery at Christ Church, where the evening par- 
ties were gatherings of all that was most distin- 
guished in university life. He was then a most at- 
tractive personality, brilliant, of course, still young, 
not very tall, but extremely good-looking, an accom- 
plished musician, the friend of Mendelssohn. His 
conversation was delightfully illuminating, and he 
was generous enough not to grudge the enjoyment 
of it to a humble undergraduate who was only too 
ready to sit at his feet. It was a regret to me that 



68 Redesdale's Further Memories 

I left Oxford to enter the Foreign Office without 
having had the chance of attending his lectures; 
but his works on the Science of Language, and es- 
pecially his "Chips from a German Workshop," 
written at the behest of the great Bunsen, who per- 
suaded the directors of the old East India Company 
on public grounds to defray the expense of his edi- 
tion of the Vedas, have been to me the joy of many 
years, and still continue to fill many an idle moment, 
robbing it of its idleness, for who could be idle with 
Max Miiller? 

$ $ * * ♦ 

A very charming book is Sabatier's "Life of St. 
Francis of Assisi" To me one of its chief attrac- 
tions lies in the strong parallel between the life of 
the mediaeval saint and the Eastern reformer. The 
points of divergence are no more than would be 
accounted for by the differences of time, place and 
surroundings. St. Francis was not a prince of the 
blood royal like the Buddha, but he was the son of a 
rich man, one of those merchants and men of mark 
who travelled through the world, visiting all the im- 
portant fairs of those days, and received as wel- 
come guests by the great nobles. Indeed, they, too, 
had a sort of patent of nobility of their own, be- 
longing to a guild of popularity — for in those days 
when newspapers were not, the rare visits of a man 
who could bring the latest court gossip from Paris 
or London, and whose waggons were often laden 
with golden tribute sent from beyond the sea to the 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 69 

Pope, were looked forward to with no little pleasure. 
So Francis, in his gilded youth, became one of the 
leading youngsters of the town, foremost in all mis- 
chief and riotous living, a fighter and a daredevil, 
ruffling it in all the fantastic coxcombry of weapons 
and dress which the ingenuity of mediaeval tailors 
and armourers could devise. 

Fighting there was in plenty in the Italian cities 
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who so 
ready to fight as the extravagant young scapegrace, 
who was as keen to throw away his life as his 
money ? After one of the local raids came imprison- 
ment for a year — then more fighting, followed by 
illness, fever and repentance; after that solitude, 
meditation, and the final renunciation of the world, 
the flesh and the devil, when the manifest likeness 
to the Buddha first asserted itself. 

The long, lonely silences in the carceri, the little 
natural caves on the side of Mount Subasio, when 
the saint, plunged in profoundest thought, was 
dreaming dreams of founding an order which was 
to save mankind, cannot but remind us of the royal 
prince starving in the wilderness, he, too, dreaming 
of the rescue of the world from sin. Both founded 
their orders on principles which involved the giving 
up of everything to which men hold most firmly. 
There was to be no property, no house, no home, no 
family. Rags and beggary were no disgrace — 
rather the hall-mark of a spiritual nobility. Home- 
less, their disciples were to wander forth, trusting 



70 Redesdale's Further Memories 

in Providence and charity, which should do some- 
thing towards filling the beggar's bowl. Neither 
saw at first that these were conditions which sooner 
or later must break down. Religion needs its lux- 
uries and will have them: a school of absolute ef- 
facement of the world was impossible in the West 
as it had been in the East. To venture any minute 
sketch of the aims of the two reformers is beyond 
what I can do here. Both were animated by the 
most perfect spirit of self-sacrifice with which they 
vainly endeavoured to inspire their orders, but no 
founder of religion has yet succeeded in establish- 
ing principles from which their so-called disciples 
have not sooner or later found self-justified means 
of breaking away. 

One prominent feature in the characters of these 
two saintly men has in it a touch of poetry which it 
were ill to miss. Both loved animals with a love 
that was almost holy. The Buddha held the taking 
of all life to be a sin, and it is impossible to read the 
Birth Stories, to which I have alluded elsewhere, 
without feeling that they were inspired by the ten- 
derest sympathy. St. Francis preached to the birds, 
and when Buddha taught in the Deer Forest near 
Benares, stags and hinds stood still and listened. 

"Birds, my brethren," said St. Francis to the 
birds that fluttered round him, "it is your duty 
greatly to praise and love your Creator. He has 
given you feathers for raiment, wings to fly, and 
filled all your needs. He has made you the noblest 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 71 

of His creatures ; He allows you to live in the pure 
air: you have no need to sow or to reap, but He 
cares for you, protects you and directs you." And 
the birds stretched their necks, spread their wings, 
opened their beaks and looked at him as if thanking 
him, while he walked about amongst them, caress- 
ing them with the hem of his robe. Then he gave 
them his blessing and took leave of them. 

When he was preaching at Alviano the swal- 
lows made such a noise with their twittering that 
he could not make himself heard. The gentle 
saint rebuked them: "It is my turn to speak," he 
said. "Swallows, little sisters, listen to the Word 
of God, be silent and hold your peace, until I shall 
have said my say!" But for all this and much 
more, how St. Francis praised God for all His 
creatures and specially for "My Lord the Sun, for 
of Thee, oh! Most High, he is the symbol,"* we 
must turn to the pages of Sabatier. To St. Francis, 
as to the Buddha, all God's creatures and the life 
which He gave them were sacred. 

If there was much that was alike in the two 
men, there was one point in which they essentially 
differed. St. Francis was no scholar. He knew 
a little Latin, which he had learnt from the monks 
of St. George; that was a necessity for a man in 
his position, for Latin was a sort of lingua franca 

* How like a passage in one of Robert Louis Stevenson's prayers 
written at Vailima: "We thank Thee, Lord, for the glory of the 
late days and the excellent face of Thy Sun." 



72 Redesdale's Further Memories 

in his day, and was the language of sermons and 
of political discussions. Writing was a difficulty 
to him; he rarely took a pen in his hand and could 
do little more than sign his name. The autograph 
of the Sacro Convento, which is held to be genuine, 
gives evidence of great awkwardness. For the 
most part, he dictated, and would sign his letters 
with a simple T, the symbol of the Holy Cross. 
The Buddha, on the contrary, like St. Paul among 
the Pharisees, was a man of learning, deeply versed 
in the classics of the Brahmans, and well able to 
hold his own in discussions with the priests upon 
religion and upon the interpretation of the poems 
of the Rig Veda. 

There is no ancient historical problem of so great 
interest as that of the Aryas, that mysterious 
people of whom we talk so much and know so 
little, as has been pointed out. The movements of 
the planets, the orbits of comets, have been ac- 
curately calculated; Nature is continually being 
compelled to yield many of her secrets to the 
patient investigations of science. But of this mas- 
terful white race, some of whom, from the high 
tablelands of Central Asia, swarmed down upon 
India as conquerors, while others, wandering by 
the shores of the Caspian Sea, overran Europe to 
become the progenitors of all that is noblest in 
mankind, there is no record, no history, and in 
regard to them even fable is silent. Where there 
is no writing, not so much as a graven stone, there 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 73 

can be no Champollion, no Rawlinson. The migra- 
tions of the Aryas, which meant so much for the 
children of men, were long unsuspected, and only 
in recent times realized. Even so, the few men 
of learning who gave thought to this crucial human 
enigma were travellers in a dense and dark forest, 
until in the Cimmerian gloom comparative philology 
opened out vistas — none too broad — through which 
they were enabled to gain glimpses of a civiliza- 
tion and people of whom all trace had been lost 
in the midst of many decades of centuries. Narrow 
as they were, they afforded the ttov <ttS> from which 
the investigation of the lost history was set in 
motion. 

Of this modern learning we must acknowledge 
Max Miiller as the foremost prophet. Bopp, 
Schlegel, Humboldt, Grimm and Burnouf were 
great men, but Max Miiller, like Saul among the 
Benjamites, "from his shoulders and upward was 
higher" than any of them, and he it was who in- 
troduced the science of language into his country. 
To one who, like myself, has been a faithful be- 
liever in his teaching, it is a matter of unceasing 
wonder that there should be men of undoubted 
scientific and literary merit who hold in opposition 
to him that the Aryas were originally a European 
race, who in remote times found their way into 
Central Asia. This bold theory was started about 
the year 1839 by a famous Belgian geologist and 
ethnologist, Omalius d'Halloy, and it was taken up 



74 Redesdale's Further Memories 

by no less a man than Robert Gordon Latham, by 
Benfey, Spiegel, Poesche, Penka, Schrader and 
others. Max Miiller appears to attribute the idea 
to Benfey, a Jew, who was a learned Orientalist 
and professor of comparative philology at Got- 
tingen. In Vol. IV., page 223, of Max Muller's 
"Chips from a German Workshop," we read: 
"We have all accustomed ourselves to look for the 
cradle of the Aryan languages in Asia, and to 
imagine these dialects flowing like streams from 
the centre of Asia to the south, the west and the 
north. I must confess that Professor Benfey's 
protest against this theory seems to me very oppor- 
tune, and his arguments in favour of a more 
Northern, if not European, origin of the whole 
Aryan family of speech deserve, at all events, far 
more attention than they have hitherto received." 
In spite of this, Max Miiller does not seem to 
have bestowed that attention upon them, for I can 
find nothing either in confirmation or contradiction 
of the theory. He at once goes off at a tangent on 
the comparative inter-relations of the various 
Aryan languages among themselves, but on the 
supposed European origin of the Aryan race he is 
silent. I think it just possible that Max Miiller 
may have wished to pay Benfey a compliment 
without committing himself to an endorsement of 
his views. Benfey had been strongly recommended 
to him by Bunsen, his own great friend and 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 75 

patron, for whom he cherished the most grateful 
affection. 

In a letter, dated from Heidelberg, February 
26th, 1855, Bunsen writes: "I wish you would take 
advantage of my communication to put yourself into 
correspondence with Benfey. He is well disposed 
towards you, and has openly spoken of you as the 
'apostle of German science in England/ And then 
he stands infinitely higher than the present learned 
men of his department." The desire to please Bun- 
sen would account for Max Miiller's faint praise 
of Benfey's theory, but its adoption would have 
seemed nothing less than the negation of all that he 
had so long striven to teach. (Cf. "Chips from a 
German Workshop," Vol. III., page 469.) Of 
Omalius d'Halloy, Latham and the rest, Max Miil- 
ler seems to take no heed. At any rate, I do not 
find them mentioned either in the "Chips" or in the 
lectures on the Science of Language. 

I, for my part, should as soon accept the doctrine, 
in which I saw the other day that there is still here 
and there a believer, that the world is a flat surface, 
justifying the terrors of the sailors of Columbus 
lest, when they reached the extreme west, they 
should topple over, ship and all, into space or Hades, 
by whatever name you choose to call it. 

To some men disputation and contradiction are 
an intellectual necessity — witness the beliefs that 
Bacon wrote Romeo and Juliet, and that Homer 



76 Redesdale's Further Memories 

was an unlimited liability company of prehistoric 
ballad-mongers. According to the ethnological 
faith in which I have lived for the last sixty years, 
there existed in times so remote that they go back 
beyond the birth of chronology a white folk of 
shepherds and husbandmen who fed their flocks and 
tilled the soil in the valleys of the Highlands of 
Central Asia. There they increased and multiplied 
until the land of their birth could no longer hold 
them, and their pastures became insufficient for 
their flocks and herds. Then began their many 
wanderings. Toughened by a climate in which they 
had to live under most trying conditions of burning 
heat and extreme cold, they were a hardy race, hav- 
ing little to fear from the opposition of the weaker 
tribes who might seek to bar their way. 

There is one point in regard to the theory that 
the Aryas were originally a European race, which, 
so far as I know, has not been taken into considera- 
tion. The Aryas were obviously a superior people. 
That they proved wherever they went. In every 
migration they came, conquered and remained. Has 
there ever been known a case where a superior race 
— not a handful of men, like the crew of the May- 
floiver, but a whole nation — has migrated, taking 
all the risks and uncertainties incident to travel and 
climate, and leaving the inferior race to enjoy the 
old well-proved home undisturbed ? 

Yet that is what the Aryas must have done if 
they left Europe for the terrors and privations of 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 77 

the Highlands of Asia, remaining to face the hard- 
ships of that inhospitable region for long centuries, 
until its insufficiencies drove them to seek the kind- 
lier soil and climate which their forbears had de- 
serted. But whether the Aryas left Europe for 
Asia and thence again descended upon Europe, or 
whether they were originally an Asiatic race of 
dominant nobility, that is a question over which we 
may leave the doctors to break their learned heads, 
in the confident assurance that never can they ar- 
rive at any certainty. Theory without a backing 
of facts, without documentary evidence, must re- 
main valueless. 

Only one thing in regard to the European migra- 
tion or migrations is certain, and that is the fact 
that all the European languages, barring those of 
the Huns, their cousins the Finns, the Basques and 
the Turks (if we may call them Europeans, which 
let us hope will soon no longer be the case), can be 
traced back to the speech of the old tribe which per- 
haps three or four thousand years ago flitted south, 
east and west from the storm-vexed valleys of the 
Pamirs, conquering and civilizing, driving the ab- 
origines before it like chaff before the wind. 

When I was a lad we used to be taught by such 
pedagogues as were sufficiently advanced to have 
heard of Sanskrit, that this and that Greek or Latin 
or other European word was "derived from the 
Sanskrit." That is all changed, and no teacher 
would nowadays dare to preach such nonsense. We 



78 Redesdale's Further Memories 

know now that Sanskrit, which must have been 
more or less a dead language in Buddha's time, only 
known at any rate by the more learned among the 
priests, was the descendant, like Greek, Latin, Rus- 
sian, English, the Celtic tongues and others, from a 
much older language which was spoken by our fore- 
fathers in the Highlands of Central Asia. But 
Sanskrit, albeit not our parent speech, but rather 
a distant cousin of our own European tongues, dead 
and buried though it has been for some two thou- 
sand years, has been the key by which the learned 
have unlocked the door of the most secret muni- 
ment-room of ethnological lore. 

It is not possible to realize all that the Buddha 
achieved in the world unless we have some concep- 
tion of the religious and social condition of Asia at 
the time of his great renunciation. That condition 
was the result of the two great inroads of the Aryas, 
the one of the south into Persia, the other to the 
south and east overrunning India. The one was 
that of the fire-worshippers and Zarathustra (Zo- 
roaster), whose sacred canon was the Zend Avesta; 
the other that of the Brahmans, whose inspired 
message was the Rig Veda. From the former are 
descended the modern Parsees and Guebres, and 
there is some justification for believing that the 
separation of these two streams of invasion may 
have been due to religious dissent; for to the Parsee 
— the believer in Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd), the one 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 79 

God, Creator of the Universe — the gods of the 
Brahmans are an abomination, and no book is to a 
pious Parsee so much to be abhorred as the Rig 
Veda. In the Veda the Gods are called Deva. This 
word in Sanskrit means bright, brightness or light 
being one of the most general attributes shared by 
the various manifestations of the Deity, invoked in 
the Veda as Sun, or Sky, or Fire, or Dawn, or 
Storm. ... In the Zend Avesta the same word 
Deva means evil spirit. Like the Buddha, Zarathus- 
tra was a heretic and a dissenter, and his sacred 
book, the Zend Avesta, was an attempt to replace 
the worship of the forces of nature by a religion — 
purer and more spiritual — under one Divine Crea- 
tor, Ahura Mazda, the wise spirit. 

It is much to be regretted that, like our Lord, the 
Buddha should have left no written word of his 
own. It would have been interesting to know 
whether he held the Brahmanic gods in the same 
contempt as did Zarathustra and his followers. In- 
asmuch as he denied the inspiration of the Veda, 
he obviously must have repudiated them, and in his 
teaching, as it has been recorded, they play no part. 
But Max Muller certainly underestimates the re- 
spect assigned to them in the later Buddhism of the 
monks when he says: "In Buddhism we find these 
ancient Devas, Indra and the rest, as merely legend- 
ary beings carried about at shows, as servants of 
Buddha, as goblins or fabulous heroes; but no 



80 Redesdale's Further Memories 

longer worshipped or even feared by those with 
whom the name of Deva had lost every trace of its 
original meaning." 

Now it is impossible to deny that all over the 
East, wherever there is a Buddhist temple, there 
the images of the old Devas, grim and repellent, are 
devoutly worshipped and propitiated by prayer, 
even by people who have no inkling of their signifi- 
cance. Moreover, it has been for many centuries 
the policy of Buddhist missionaries to claim the 
native saints in countries which they seek to convert 
as reincarnations of the Buddha, and therefore to 
be worshipped. For instance, in Japan, Hachiman, 
the indigenous God of War, is adored in Buddhist 
temples, and there are many such cases, where there 
is no question of "goblins or fabulous heroes." In 
modern times the Jesuits adopted the same policy 
in China, in regard to so-called Worship of An- 
cestors and of Tien — Heaven; thereby bringing 
down upon themselves the wrath of the meddling 
and muddling Dominicans and Franciscans the in- 
terference of the Pope, between whom and the 
Emperor-King Hsi there arose a controversy, in 
which the former was worsted and the cause of 
Christianity in China was set back for centuries. 

I have spoken of the Aryas as of "a people of 
whom we know so little," and yet, in truth, the 
wonder is that we should know so much with the 
almost mathematical certainty afforded by the 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 81 

study of language and of the Rig Veda, those beau- 
tiful hymns for which the Brahmans claim Sruti 
■ — divine inspiration — and which are by far the 
oldest document of the whole Aryan race. That 
there should exist any writing of the age to which 
they belong is a physical impossibility ; the heat and 
damp of the Indian climate are swift and ruthless 
in their work of destruction. Even in the Buddha's 
time the very language of the Vedas was dead and 
understood only by the priests. But we know from 
the journals of the Chinese pilgrim, Hsiien 
Chwang — as Max Miiller points out — with what 
painful care the hymns were preserved orally by the 
Brahmans in the seventh century a. d. We have 
also, as he further points out, the analogy of 
Hebrew, the MSS. of the Old Testament, none of 
which is older than the tenth century, but of which 
the truth is tested by comparison with the Septua- 
gint. We know that "every hymn, every verse, 
every word and syllable in the Veda were accurately 
counted by native scholars about five or six hun- 
dred years before Christ." It is supposed that the 
collection of hymns was finished some eleven or 
twelve hundred years b. c. But some of the hymns 
were then ancient, some modern, "so that we can- 
not well assign a date more recent than 1200 to 
1500 before our era for the original composition of 
those simple hymns which up to the present day are 
regarded by the Brahmans with the same feelings 



82 Redesdale's Further Memories 

with which a Mohammedan regards the Koran, a 
Jew the Old Testament, a Christian his Gospel."* 

Some of the hymns appear to me to contain pas- 
sages of almost sublime beauty, though Max Miiller 
says: "The historical importance of the Veda can 
hardly be exaggerated, but its intrinsic merit, and 
particularly the beauty or elevation of its senti- 
ments, have by many been rated far too high. Large 
numbers of the Vedic hymns are childish in the ex- 
treme: tedious, low, commonplace." And then he 
goes on to show how the Gods are invoked to grant 
long life, food, large flocks, large families, for 
which they are to be rewarded with sacrifices, etc. 
Here I cannot but think that the great professor, 
for whom I entertain such sincere respect, is a little 
unfair. Is not the idea of looking to their God as 
the Giver of all good things common to all primeval 
peoples ? 

The Jews, for instance, though they were full of 
wise words about the vanity of riches, still looked to 
Jehovah to enable them to "eat the riches of the 
Gentiles," and to lead them to "a land of wheat and 
barley and fig trees and pomegrantes : a land of oil 
olives and honey," and of mineral wealth. Again 
Solomon says : "My son, forget not my law, but let 
thine heart keep my commandments ; for length of 
days, and long life, and peace shall they add to 
thee." Prayers for material prosperity to God, 
under whatsoever name He may be worshipped, are 

* "Chips from a German Workshop," Vol. I., p. 13. 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 83 

common to all religions, and it is hardly just to 
brand the hymns of the Veda as "tedious, low, com- 
monplace," because the ancient herdsmen of the 
Pamirs were no more disinterested in their prayers 
than the rest of mankind, but addressed their 
material petitions to God just as King David and 
King Solomon did. 

It was natural enough that these men, abiding in 
the fields, keeping watch over their flocks and herds 
by day and by night, under the eternal ice and snow 
of the heaven-reaching mountains, should worship 
the light — all that was Deva (light) was to them 
sacred and symbolical of the Godhead — and so the 
Deus of the Latins was originally Light, and when 
we talk of "divine," "divinity," we are looking back 
to the worship of our ancestors when they prayed to 
the Sun, the Fire, the Sky, the Dawn, which were 
the givers of all good things. Sometimes they are 
invoked under the names of Varuna, Mitra, Indra. 
"In one hymn Agni (fire) is called the ruler of the 
universe, the lord of men, the wise king, the father, 
the brother, the son, the friend of men. ... In 
another hymn, Indra is said to be greater than all; 
the Gods, it is said, do not reach Thee, Indra, nor 
men; Thou overcomest all creatures in strength. 
Another God, Soma, is called the King of the 
World, the King of Heaven and Earth, the Con- 
queror of all. And what more could human lan- 
guage achieve in trying to express the idea of a 
divine and supreme power, than what another poet 



84 Redesdale's Further Memories 

says of another God, Varuna : 'Thou art Lord of all, 
of Heaven and earth; thou art the King of all, of 
those who are Gods and of those who are men?' " 

How beautiful is the following litany : 

"In the beginning there arose the golden child. 
He was the one born Lord of all that is. He estab- 
lished the earth and this sky; who is the God to 
Whom we shall offer our sacrifice? 

"He who gives life, He who gives strength, 
Whose command all the bright Gods revere ; Whose 
shadow is immortality; Whose shadow is death; 
Who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sac- 
rifice? 

"He who through His power is the one King of 
the breathing and awakening world; He who 
governs all, man and beast ; who is the God to Whom 
we shall offer our sacrifice? 

"He Whose greatness these snowy mountains, 
Whose greatness the seas proclaim with the distant 
river; He Whose regions are, as it were, His two 
arms ; who is the God to Whom we shall offer our 
sacrifice? 

"He through Whom the sky is bright and the 
earth firm — He through Whom the heaven was 
'stablished, nay, the highest heaven — He who 
measured out the light in the air; who is the God to 
Whom we shall offer sacrifice? 

"He to Whom heaven and earth, standing firm 
by His will, look up trembling inwardly — He over 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 85 

Whom the rising sun shines forth ; who is the God 
to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice? 

"Wherever the mighty waterclouds went, where 
they placed the seed and lit the fire, thence arose He 
who is the sole life of the bright Gods ; who is the 
God to Whom we shall offer our sacrifice? 

"He who by His might looked even over the 
waterclouds, the clouds which gave strength and 
lit the sacrifice, He who alone is God above all Gods ; 
who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sac- 
rifice? 

"May He not destroy us — He, the creator of the 
earth ; or He, the righteous, who created the Heaven 
— He also created the bright and mighty waters; 
who is the God to Whom we shall offer our sac- 
rifice?" 

Well might Max Miiller, who has unearthed 
them, redeem his dispraise of the hymns by saying : 
"Hidden in this rubbish there are precious stones !" 
Right well do the hymns, or, at any rate, those 
which he admits to be "precious stones," deserve 
their title Rig Veda, the knowledge of Praise. 
Nothing can be finer, more masculine, than a pro- 
pitiatory hymn to the Maruts, the Storm Gods, of 
which he gives us a translation: "They make the 
rocks to tremble, they tear asunder the kings of the 
forest. Come on, Maruts, like madmen, ye Gods, 
with your whole tribe." No wonder men, whose 
lives had to face the terrors of the icy wilderness, 



86 Redesdale's Further Memories 

sought the favour of the unruly forces whose rage 
meant death to them and to their herds and flocks. 
A hymn to Agni (fire), "the son of strength, the 
conqueror of horses, the highborn," is less striking, 
but the zenith of the Vedic poetry is reached, as it 
seems to me, in a prayer addressed to Ushas, the 
Dawn. What a picture it suggests of the old herds- 
man in those frozen solitudes, falling on his knees 
when the stars grow pale before the first glimmer 
of light that stretches along the eastern horizon, 
thankfully to worship the radiant Goddess who puts 
to flight the dark shadows of the night and its un- 
seen dangers. Listen to his song of praise : 

"She shines upon us, like a young wife, rousing 
every living being to go to his work. When the 
fire had to be kindled by men, she made the light by 
striking down darkness. 

"She rose up, spreading far and wide, and mov- 
ing everywhere. She grew in brightness, wearing 
her brilliant garment. The mother of the cows (the 
mornings), the leader of the days, she shone gold- 
coloured, lovely to behold. 

"She, the fortunate, who brings the eye of the 
Gods, who leads the white and lovely steed (of the 
sun), the Dawn, was seen revealed by her rays, with 
brilliant treasures, following every one. 

"Thou who art a blessing where thou art near, 
drive far away the unfriendly; make the pasture 
wide, give us safety! Scatter the enemy, bring 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 87 

riches! Raise up wealth to the worshipper, thou 
mighty Dawn. 

"Shine for us with thy best rays, thou bright 
Dawn, thou who lengthenest our life, thou the love 
of all, who givest us food, who givest us wealth in 
cows, horses and chariots. 

"Thou daughter of the sky, thou high born Dawn, 
whom the Vasishthas magnify with songs, give us 
riches high and wide; all ye Gods protect us al- 
ways with your blessings/'* 

So the old shepherd prays, and the Goddess, 
answering to his call, spreads her rosy mantle over 
the sky, and tinges the snowy peaks and ridges of 
the ice-bound mountains : the sun rises in his glory, 
and the peace of a new day is born to the world. 

The piety of the old Aryans admits of no doubt. 
We are told that the consciousness of sin is a prom- 
inent feature in their religion. The poet of the 
Veda searches eagerly for his sin, and finds it not 
in his will but in his condition, which even in his 
dreams holds up evil before his eyes, and at last he 
turns to his God, the God of Grace who enlightens 
the simple. He believes in the power of the gods to 
take away from man the heavy burden of his sins. 
"Varuna is merciful to him who has committed." 

One more point should be noticed in any attempt, 
however slight, to give a sketch of the religion of 
the Veda. Max Miiller tells us that it knows of no 
idols. This is the more remarkable when we think 

* Max Miiller's "Chips," Vol. I., pp. 36-37. 



88 Redesdale's Further Memories 

of the innumerable idols of savage and revengeful 
Gods by which Indian, Chinese and Japanese tem- 
ples are degraded; all the nightmares of later 
monks who knew nothing of the pure and clean- 
minded Aryans, whose Gods, as Oldenberg tells us, 
in contrast to others, were bright and friendly be- 
ings without malice, cruelty and deceit. 

It has been well said that the highest value of the 
sacred poems of the Aryans is historic, and that 
value has been revealed by the comparatively recent 
study of Sanskrit. That is in the school in which 
we learn who the Aryans were, what was the man- 
ner of their lives, their religion and their thoughts ; 
and we can, in a measure, trace much of what, after 
many centuries, led to the development of a Hindu 
school of metaphysics, in comparison with which 
the much vaunted Pythagoreans and Greek thinkers 
were as babes and sucklings. The very name Arya 
tells us that this ancient people was a race of hus- 
bandmen and tillers of the soil, the root ar from 
which the word is derived being found again in the 
Latin arare, to plough, aratrum, a plough, and in 
the Greek aporpov; and when we talk of our "daugh- 
ters," it is well that we should remember that our 
ancestors on the Steppes, many thousand years ago, 
themselves invented the word "duhitar," the milk- 
maid, the very word with which we Europeans, in 
one shape or another, caress our women-children. 
The hymns and prayers of the Vedas abound in al- 
lusions to the herds and flocks of these old farmers, 



Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi 89 

whose best friends — and therefore the object of 
their adoration — were the sun, the stars, the rains 
of heaven; just as their enemies — therefore to be 
propitiated — were the storms, the snow and the 
cruel winds : these were — the life-givers and death- 
givers. The life of the lonely watcher of the 
Steppes was of its essence one of contemplation, 
reflection and introspection. 

Let me give one pregnant quotation from Max 
Miiller's "History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature" ; 
"At the first dawn of traditional history we see 
these Aryan tribes migrating across the snow of the 
Himalaya southward toward the Seven Rivers (the 
Indus, the five rivers of the Punjab and the Saras- 
vati), and ever since India has been called their 
home. That before that time they had been living 
in more northern regions, within the same precincts, 
with the ancestors of the Greeks, the Italians, Sla- 
vonians, Germans, the Celts, is a fact as firmly es- 
tablished as that the Normans of William the Con- 
queror were the Northmen of Scandinavia. The 
evidence of language is irrefragable, and it is the 
only evidence worth listening to with regard to ante- 
historical periods. It would have been impossible 
to discover any traces of relationship between the 
swarthy natives of India and their conquerors, 
whether Alexander or Clive, but for the testimony 
borne by language." ("Sanskrit Literature," pp. 
12, 13.) 

To the learned Jew — a Semite, to the Hungarian, 



go Redesdale's Further Memories 

the Finn, or the Basque, who are Turanian settlers 
in Europe, the history of the Aryans is an interest- 
ing study, linguistic or racial. To us true Euro- 
peans, to us true Aryans, it has a far greater signifi- 
cance. It has all the charm of an inquiry into a 
piece of remote family history — all the glamour of 
a pedigree, not to be measured by a few puny cen- 
turies, but reaching far away into the clouds of 
incalcuable aeons. 

Talking idly in a garden, we can do no more than 
touch the mere fringe of a mighty problem, even 
though it should be suggested by the great silent 
Buddha. For instance, we have summoned as wit- 
ness the one word "daughter," when there are so 
many others that we use a dozen times a day which 
are equally strong links in the long chain of evi- 
dence by which we prove our descent. But no mat- 
ter — we have started the clue: let who will pick it 
up. It will reward him. 



CHAPTER III 
The Commune 

MY Pegasus is not always inclined to take 
long flights. Sometimes when a lazy- 
fit is upon him he will venture no more 
than a trip across the Channel, carrying me to Ger- 
many, Italy, Switzerland — perhaps landing me no 
further off than some place in France. But of that 
beloved country I have so many recollections, some 
gay, some sad, that I crave to go no further. One 
such trip is very short but very tragic. Forty-six 
years have passed since the episode of which I 
write, but the scenes of those few days are graven 
so deeply in my mind that no lapse of time can ever 
efface them. They haunt me like the pathetic 
thoughts which are aroused by the solitary little 
pink slipper of the Princesse de Lamballe in the 
Musee Cluny. Thoughts are such obstinate vaga- 
bonds that they must needs choose their own road, 
and not even the Buddha, in his Veluvana, can drive 
them eastward unless such be their will. 

The final tragedy of 1871 (from a repetition of 
the horror of which, may Heaven preserve France 
and ourselves!) is no doubt in these days eclipsed 
by the brutal outrages upon which Kultur is ever 

91 



92 Redesdale's Further Memories 

improving. What will forty-five more years do? 
That mechanical invention and chemical discoveries 
should come into play is, I suppose, inevitable. The 
strange thing is that the whole coarse-fibred soul of 
the German seems to be infected by the very poten- 
tialities of all these ghastly new discoveries, which 
seem to urge them on to new cruelties and new 
crimes. In 1870 he knew how to spare. Witness 
Paris. Now it is otherwise. Still, to us who lived 
in those days what will always be known as the 
Franco-German war remains as a poignantly pain- 
ful memory; though the ravages of war and the 
carnage were terrible, it was the parricidal fury of 
anarchy and its monads which made men's blood 
run cold. 

The Commune, that hideous catastrophe which 
reversed the unnatural crime of Saturn — the chil- 
dren murdering and devouring their own parent 
— ended tragically with the month of May, 1871. 
One morning I got a note from the Duke of Suther- 
land, saying that he had received information that 
the first train would be allowed into Paris the next 
day, and suggesting that we should go over and see 
whether we could be of any use. We started the 
following morning — the Duke, George Crawley, 
Wright, the Duke's secretary, and myself; but the 
train was stopped at Creil that afternoon, and we 
had to stay there rather miserably for the night. 
The place was swarming with Prussian soldiery, 
scowling and truculent-looking, clanking their spurs 



The Commune 93 

defiantly all about the station and town. The people 
returned their evil looks with interest, but it was of 
no use — they were the masters. Vcb victis! It is 
a terrible sight to see a great people trampled on 
and tortured by the savagery of a victorious army ; 
but when that army is a Prussian army — ask the 
Belgians. 

There was no difficulty the next day; the train 
started early, and we were in Paris betimes. There 
were not many cabs at the station, but there was no 
great competition, so we were soon suited. I got on 
the box by the driver, as I was curious to hear what 
he had to say of the siege and the Commune. 
Strange to say, he, like every Parisian with whom 
I talked, was far more bitter against the Com- 
mune than against the Prussians. After all, men 
said, the Prussians spared our monuments; the 
Commune destroyed them. When we arrived ar- 
rests were taking place all over the town, and there 
was still some shooting of men in the streets, though 
we did not see it. Full of pathetic suggestion were 
the little heaps of clothes piled up in the squares 
and at the corners of streets. 

There were some uniforms, but mostly they were 
made up of humble blouses and the civilian caps of 
what we should call street arabs — the titis of old 
Paris. The owners, as the cabman said, were all 
rotting in the Fosse Commune; he himself was full 
of belated valour. "If there had only been ten men 
like me," he protested, "ten determined stalwarts, 



94 Redesdale's Further Memories 

a horror like the Commune would have been im- 
possible." I asked him what he did. "Mon Dieu! 
Monsieur! Que pouvais-je faire contre tous ces 
brigands? J'etais tout seul. Je me suis refugie 
dans la cave." 

The next day a worthy shopkeeper held just the 
same language. Ten men such as himself could 
have held the Rue de la Paix and kept the Com- 
munards at bay. He tried to persuade his neigh- 
bours, but they would not join with him, so, regret- 
fully, he, too, hid in the cellar. It was strange to 
listen to these bourgeois who had shown such 
courage and determination and endurance during 
the siege, when the Prussians were battering them 
out of existence. They could face the Prussians 
gallantly ; before the Commune they quailed. 

The Rue de Rivoli was a piteous sight. The 
Ministere des Finances was burnt and gutted; the 
roof had fallen in, the windows were all gaping, 
and out of one of them there was a bit of charred 
blind fluttering dismally in the light summer air 
like the ghost of a flag. The Tuileries were nothing 
but a pile of charred stones, hardly the skeleton of 
a palace left ; but the Louvre was luckily to all in- 
tents and purposes unharmed. It was enough to 
make a man weep to see the havoc, the ruins, and 
everywhere the signs of murder and violence. The 
Communards and petroleuses had done their work 
thoroughly. 

We dropped the luggage at the hotel, dismissed 




GUSTAVE COURBET 

From a painting by himself in the Louvre 



The Commune 95 

the cabman, still fully convinced of the potentiality 
of his own valour, and started forth for a morning 
stroll on foot. 

When we came to the Place Vendome, the great 
column, the bronze record of the past glories of the 
French army, was lying prone on a bed of straw, 
torn down by the sacrilege of Gustave Courbet, the 
Ministre des Beaux-Arts under the Commune. It 
had been badly smashed, and some small fragments 
had been carried away as souvenirs, but many of 
these were, I was told, recovered. As we drew near 
to look at the cruel misdeed, a peloton of soldiers 
came along with a civilian in their midst, whom they 
were carrying off to a guard-room hard by. It was 
Courbet himself, whom I knew well by sight. I 
was not the only man to recognize him. An elderly 
gentleman with a little boy of about fourteen years 
was passing by. When he saw the prisoner he 
dashed forward, and before the guards could stop 
him, knocked off Courbet's hat, shouting out : "Au 
moins, scelerat, tu te decouvriras devant la colonne 
que tu as faite tomber." Courbet, dazed by this 
fury of explosive patriotism, picked up his hat and 
said nothing, while the gentleman, well pleased with 
himself, walked on with his little son, and the guard 
grinned satisfaction, but took no further notice. 

I had often seen Courbet in former days at the 
Cafe Royal, where he used to go for his midday 
meal. As he was something of a sommite, a celeb- 
rity in art as elsewhere for all his rebellious pro- 



96 Redesdale's Further Memories 

divides, the maitre d'hotel used to receive him with 
the greatest ceremony, bowing to the ground and 
rubbing his hands : "Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet. 
Que pourrai-je offrir a Monsieur ce matin. J'ai un 
Chateaubriand qui est de toute confiance," etc., etc., 
etc. Courbet would sit down with majestic conde- 
scension, like a true anarchist, deigning to be waited 
upon with all the adulation which was due to him. 

Well, it so happened that after the little scene 
which I have described in the Place Vendome, we 
went on to the Cafe Royal, where we were received 
with effusive welcome by the maitre d'hotel. Like 
everybody else, he began talking about the recent 
tragedies and inveighing against the Commune. I 
told him of the arrest of Courbet, his old patron, 
and he at once launched out into the most violent 
abuse of him. "Oh! Monsieur, ne me parlez pas 
de ce sale communeux! Si jamais il ose remettre 
les pieds ici c'est a moi qu'il aura affaire!" I asked 
him why he used the word "communeux," I thought 
the word was communard. "Oui, Monsieur," he 
replied sententiously, "mais on dit crapule, crapu- 
leux, commune, communeux, c'est plus meritant." 
Courbet was sentenced to six months' imprison- 
ment, and was condemned, moreover, to pay a very 
heavy fine for the fall of the column — none too 
severe a punishment in all the circumstances of the 
case. 

Some time after the expiration of the six 
months I was again in Paris, and went to the Cafe 



The Commune 97 

Royal for luncheon. Who should come in a few 
minutes later but the great Courbet. Up rushed 
the maitre d'hotel to meet him, and I anticipated a 
first-rate row. Not a bit of it ! To my amazement 
I heard the old welcome : "Bonjour, Monsieur Cour- 
bet!? Qu'est-ce-qu'on peut vous offrir ce matin?" 
etc. The old story, the old refrain, the obsequious 
bows, the festive rubbing of hands. I could not 
resist reminding my friend of what he had said a 
few months before. Ah! he said, that was all so 
long ago! "D'ailleurs," he added, "il ne faut pas 
oublier qu'il a ete ministre, et on ne sais jamais ce 
qui peut arriver !" 

Old Lady Edward Thynne used to tell a capital 
story of Courbet, whom she met a few years before 
1870 at some artistic gathering in Paris. He had 
been airing his political views for some minutes, 
when to draw him out she said : "But then it seems 
that all this while I have been talking with a real 
red republican." "Rouge, Madame," was the an- 
swer, "dites, plutot, violet," and then he went off 
again at score. "But why," she asked, "do you say 
that you want to pull down the Tuileries?" 
"Madame, parce que tant que cette sacree maison 
durera il y aura toujours des coquins qui voudront 
venir y demeurer." 

Another notable arrest was that of Paschal 
Grousset, the so-called Minister of Foreign Affairs. 
He was caught disguised as a woman in the Rue 
Condorcet, which created a great sensation. Sir 



gS Redesdale's Further Memories 

Edward Malet, who as second secretary of the 
British Embassy, had been obliged to have some 
dealings with him, told me that he was really a very 
pleasant little man, who was always civil and oblig- 
ing to foreigners. "Not a bad little fellow," Malet 
used to say. I saw him some years later in London, 
when he was correspondent of I forget which of the 
French newspapers, and he came to me at the Office 
of Works to ask for an admission to a volunteer 
review which the Queen was to hold in Hyde Park. 
He was so agreeable that I quite understood Malet's 
verdict on him. 

In the evening we went to dine at Voisin's, where 
I had heard that the members of the Government of 
the Commune had been dining and breakfasting 
every day during their short lease of power. Good 
old Bellanger, the famous sommelier, was delighted 
to see us. I asked after a certain old chambertin 
— had he any left? "Pour Monsieur il y en aura 
toujours," was the answer. But I said, "I wonder 
that your late patrons did not drink it all up!" 
"Ah! Monsieur, si vous croyez que j'allais donner 
de ce vin la a ces charapans ! Monsieur, lorsque j'ai 
su qu'ils allaient venir ici je suis descendu dans la 
cave et j'ai change toutes les etiquettes. lis cro- 
yaient boire les meilleurs crus — s'ils avaient su ce 
que je leur servais! Mas j'etais sur de mon af- 
faire! Est-ce qu'ils s'y connaissaient ces animaux- 
la? And then he went on grumbling: "Ah! mais 
non, non! Du chambertin — jamais de la vie!" 



The Commune 99 

Truly there is a comic element in every tragedy, 

and a grave-digger in every Hamlet. 

***** 

Of all the crimes and cruelties which disgraced 
the Commune, none excited greater horror than the 
murder of Monseigneur Darboy, the Archbishop of 
Paris, and the priests who with him and many 
others were seized as hostages. The flames of the 
Tuileries and other monuments, the hell-fire orgies 
of the mob and the petroleuses drunken with the 
lust of blood and incendiarism — when the very fire- 
men pumped petrol instead of water on to the burn- 
ing buildings — were almost forgotten in the execra- 
tion of that sacrilege. Upwards of sixty hostages, 
all innocent peaceable men, against no one of whom 
could any misdeed be alleged, were put to death. 
They were imprisoned in La Roquette, and on the 
24th of May the Archbishop and the Abbe de 
Guerry, the Cure of the Madeleine, with Monsieur 
Bonjeau, the president of the Cour de Cassation, 
and three Jesuit priests (Fathers Ducondray, Al- 
lard and Clair), after a sham trial, were led into the 
courtyard of the prison and shot. The Archbishop, 
who was the second of the victims to suffer, met 
his death like the hero and Christian martyr that he 
was. He stepped to the front, and praying to God 
for the forgiveness of his murderers, gave them his 
pastoral blessing. Two of the firing party, less 
hardened than the others, knelt down and asked his 
pardon. When the butchery was over the ruffians 



ioo Redesdale's Further Memories 

stripped the Archbishop's honoured body, and that 
no degradation might be wanting, carted it off to 
be thrown like the carrion or a malefactor into the 
Fosse Commune. Even decent burial was to be 
denied to him. 

After the last desperate fight at the cemetery of 
Pere la Chaise, in which men and women fought 
like tigers and tigresses, neither giving nor asking 
for quarter, all mad to kill, and kill, and kill, the 
body was recovered and carried to the archiepisco- 
pal palace, where it lay in state, with those of the 
other priests. All Paris nocked to do homage to 
one of God's saints, and take a last look at the be- 
loved old man. Those who could afford it were in 
deep mourning, but all were weeping from the rich- 
est down to the poorest and humblest, as I saw them 
march past the body. The Archbishop, lying mitred 
and robed, looked like a waxen image. There was 
no sign of pain in his face, no trace of the cruel 
sorrow and long suspense by which his last days 
must have been racked ; on it was written only that 
divine peace which passeth all understanding. 

The hour-glass had been turned and the sands of 
the Commune had run out. The prison of La Ro- 
quette, the scene of so many horrors, was now in 
the hands of the Versaillais, and the cells of the 
hostages were more fitly tenanted by the murderers 
who but a few days before, when to be respectable 
was a deadly crime, had ruled Paris with a rod of 
terror. Passing by the prison, after leaving the 



The Commune 101 

Archbishop's palace, we saw that the great gates 
were open, and a crowd was gathered outside 
eagerly watching and craning necks to see what 
was going on within. I asked what the people were 
waiting for? A batch of prisoners was to be led 
out to the fortifications to be shot. Next to me was 
standing a rather pretty young girl of about fifteen 
or sixteen years, nicely but very simply dressed, 
evidently the daughter of well-to-do bourgeois 
parents. In charge of her was a bonne, an elderly 
woman wearing a linen cap, and the typical tartan 
fichu pinned across her breast. 

Presently the excitement began. First came 
three omnibuses, their usual function, as their 
placards showed, being to take pleasure-seekers to 
the Jardin des Plantes ; they were driven by soldiers, 
other soldiers or gendarmes sitting on the top and 
acting as conductors. Inside an evil-looking crew 
of scowling ruffians, some of them wounded, all 
dirty, unshaven and truculent-looking — villains who 
knew that for them even hope was dead. The omni- 
buses were followed by litters, in which other sol- 
diers were carrying men who had been seriously 
wounded, some of them terribly mangled. 

In one of the litters lay a dark, fierce-looking 
man, with a shock mass of black hair. His head 
and face, pale and haggard, with a beard of three 
or four days' growth, were tied up with blood- 
stained linen bandages. His eyes were closed, and 
he seemed hardly conscious, too feeble to move, too 



102 Redesale's Further Memories 

tired to care. He was respectably, even well 
dressed in a frock coat. Evidently a man in a 
superior position to that of those who had gone 
before. As he came, and owing to some obstruc- 
tion, his bearers paused for a minute, the girl near 
me gave a piercing shriek, and crying out: "Papa! 
Ah, Papa, c'est Papa !" fell sobbing into the arms of 
her nurse. She had come on the chance of one last 
look, and had, as the bystanders said, been waiting 
for hours. 

The wounded man, hearing the cry and recog- 
nizing the dear young voice, opened his eyes, and 
pulling himself together for a supreme effort, tried 
limply to wave his hand. His lips moved, and dur- 
ing the short halt tried to utter a few words, but 
voice would not come to his bidding; he uttered no 
sound, his eyes closed again, and quickly his bearers 
turned the corner and he was out of sight. That 
dumb farewell was the last of him. The final act 
can have been but a small matter to him, for he was, 
indeed, little more than a corpse already. The poor 
child stood there shaking from head to foot and 
weeping on the bosom of her bonne, and the crowd 
dispersed. It was a harrowing scene, it was a pa- 
thetic scene, the pathos of which could hardly be 
forgotten by any who witnessed it. After nearly 
half a century I can still see that grim procession 
of death, and the young girl's shriek of agony rings 
in my ears. 

Those were days of horror. Retribution had 



The Commune 103 

come with no halting foot; shrifts were short, and 
justice wasted no time over inquiries; it was even 
said that a good many innocents perished with the 
guilty. Whether that is true or not is hard to say, 
but it was an accusation which in the circumstances 
was sure to be made. An outcry was raised against 
the four generals of the Republican armies, Vinoy, 
Ladmisault, Cissey and Donay, to whom the guard- 
ianship of Paris, divided into four parts, was en- 
trusted. 

But far more virulent than any of the attacks 
upon them were the charges that were brought — 
most unfairly, since they only obeyed orders — 
against the Marquis de Gallifet and his dragoons. 
Those charges came from the white-livered party, 
set on by such Communists as had managed by hook 
or by crook to escape observation and save their 
skins. These did not hesitate to accuse Gallifet of 
wholesale murders of innocent men and women 
when the executions took place outside the Arc de 
l'Etoile. From inquiries which I made on the spot 
and at the time, I believe that he did no more than 
his duty. 

Gallifet was a most determined man, to whom 
duty was something sacred, bound to be carried 
out to the letter at any cost. He was, moreover, a 
born soldier, loving his men as they loved him, and 
cut to the quick by the deaths of so many comrades. 
As a cavalry leader, all men recognized his great 
worth. Brave as the steel of his own sword, utterly 



104 Redesdale's Further Memories 

reckless of his life, as he had shown in the disas- 
trous Mexican campaign and in the Great War, 
his courage was so infectious that his troopers 
would have followed him had he ordered the charge 
to be sounded against all the hosts of Satan. War 
was for him something very real, not to be treated 
with half measures or milksop compromises. He 
was a fighter, and he fought in deadly earnest. 

We hear much in these days from peacefully 
minded lawyers of the iniquity of reprisals. It 
would be a good thing if some of these learned 
gentlemen would remember the old adage, "Inter 
arma silent leges;" adding to it the words, "et 
juris consulti." It is good to see on this 3rd of 
February, 191 6, that there is at least one great 
leader of thought left in this country who takes a 
saner and more masculine view of reprisals than 
that which is held by some bishops and semi- 
parsonic lawyers. Lord Rosebery's letter to the 
Times of this day is inexorable in its logic and in its 
justice. 

We must protect our women and children. This 
is an age of cruel inventions, and if our enemies 
take advantage of them, so must we, unless we 
would wish to be as the archers of Edward the 
Third and the Black Prince would be if we sent 
them into the trenches to-day, forbidden for chival- 
rous reasons to use aught but their bows against 
modern artillery and high explosives. If Germany 
uses poison gas and liquid fire, so must we. If she 



The Commune 105 

drops bombs from airships upon innocent civilians, 
women, and children, we must follow suit. God 
forbid that it should be in the spirit of revenge; but 
what other deterrent is possible? "Vous l'avez 
voulu, Georges Dandin." It is much that Lord 
Rosebery has lifted his voice in this sense. 

Gallifet did not hesitate to adopt reprisals, and 
nobody can say that his methods failed. He knew 
that the crimes with which he had to deal could not 
be prevented in the future by the sprinklings of rose- 
water and soft-sawder. Reprisals in the sense of 
cruelty to prisoners and murders such as that of 
Nurse Cavell and Captain Fryatt, are, of course, 
quite another matter. 

I could not help taking a great interest in Galli- 
fet's proceedings, because, although I had only had 
the very slightest acquaintance with him some ten 
years before, he was the intimate friend of many 
friends of my own, both English and French. The 
Prince of Wales, as he then was, had great regard 
for him, and never failed to send for him when he 
went to Paris. 

It must have been about the year 1859 or i860 
that he, with Madame de Gallifet, the Sagans and 
the Pourtales's, came over to London for a week or 
ten days in the height of the summer season, and I 
was asked by Madame de Persigny, the French am- 
bassadress, to do what I could to make their stay 
pleasant. The three ladies, with Madame de Met- 
ternich as a fourth, were at that time the recognized 



106 Redesdale's Further Memories 

queens of Paris society, or at any rate, of that part 
of it which bowed the knee at the Imperial Court. 
Madame de Gallif et was very good-looking, and the 
Princesse de Sagan handsome and distinguished, 
but neither of them could compare with the Com- 
tesse de Pourtales, who had all the subtle charm and 
teasing beauty of which the eighteenth century 
portrait painters are the celebrants. 

Madame de Metternich, who did not come to 
London with them, was not a pretty woman ; indeed, 
she spoke of herself as "le singe a la mode;" but she 
was witty and very attractive, and so became the 
high priestess of that religion of which Worth, the 
famous man-milliner, a former apprentice of Swan 
and Edgar's, who had raised his temple in the Rue 
de la Paix, was the Pope, on the hierarchy of fash- 
ion. She was perhaps one degree greater than the 
other three ladies, but above them all was enthroned 
the Empress Eugenie, a divinity at whose altar all 
men and women were fain to fall down and worship. 

These are strangely frivolous recollections of 
pretty women and smart dresses and coxcombry of 
men-milliners that came thrusting themselves into 
the midst of one of the great tragedies of history. 
But these are the tricks which memory plays us : the 
most grotesque ideas surging up in the midst of 
acute sorrow, the dance of death serving to accen- 
tuate the follies of a farce — so unstable are our 
minds. All this is conjured up by the recollection 
of Gallif et, before he became a famous cavalry gen- 



The Commune 107 

eral, when he was a brilliant young officer, the spoilt 
child of a court, the favourite officer of an emperor, 
popular with men and women, idolized by his sol- 
diers, long before the cruel wounds of the Mexican 
campaign — when he showed what the man about 
town was worth when brought face to face with 
grim war — the last man in Europe of whom I 
should have thought that one day he would have to 
experience those emotions which cause the most cal- 
lous judge's voice to falter when he puts on the 
black cap. 

Later in life, with his closely-cropped white hair 
and moustache dyed black, he was a picturesque fig- 
ure in Paris — still a beau sabreur, still a soldier at 
every point — a name to conjure with had the op- 
portunity presented itself. 



CHAPTER IV 
Trees and Their Legends 

SOLITUDE, surrounded by memories of which 
I have spoken, and by the fanciful brood of 
thoughts to which they give birth, has a mys- 
tic power of banishing all trammels of time and of 
place. The plants in the garden begin to take 
strange forms: the bamboos are drawn up out of 
their puny Western stature into gracefully-waving 
plumes of Brobdingnagian growth, such as we see 
in the Peradeniya Gardens of Ceylon ; the oak under 
which the great Buddha sits, solemnly holding up a 
warning hand, changes into a holy Bo-tree, its long- 
stalked, pointed leaves quivering in a gentle breeze, 
laden with the heavy perfume of the sacred Cham- 
pak flower ; the fleece of clouds sails away into space 
and the soft English sky hardens into the metallic 
blue of the glaring East. 

All of a sudden a slight chilly gust chases away 
the whole illusion. Kapilavastu, Rajagriha, the 
deer forest, the Veluvana, with its crowd of yellow- 
robed monks carrying their begging bowls, fade 
away, and we are sobered into the commonplace 
realities of life on a spur of the Cotswold Hills. It 
is like the awakening after the intoxication of Has- 

108 



Trees and Their Legends 109 

hish, or after the short death dealt by laughing gas. 

The dream may have been fascinating, but there 
are glorious compensations in the awakening, for 
though our peaceful gardens are not so wildly fan- 
tastic, not such an orgy of colour, as those of the 
gorgeous tropics, our woodlands in their grave dig- 
nity are matchless : they touch the heart ; the others 
stir the senses. 

It was a lovely day in early summer, and the 
show of the Royal Horticultural Society was in full 
swing in the gardens of Chelsea Hospital. All the 
world was there — all the world, and everybody 
else's wife. A few of us were standing looking at 
a grand display of orchids, when a charming lady 
turned round to me and said: "Oh! how delicate, 
how beautiful and how distinguished they are! 
Surely the very aristocracy of plant life!" "No," 
I answered, "they are only the nouveaux riches. It 
is the old oaks of our parks and forests that are the 
aristocracy of plants." 

Surely there is nothing more proud, nothing 
more wonderful in nature, than the noble old age 
of those patriarchs which centuries ago chequered 
with their quivering shade the glades in which 
Robin Hood and Little John drew the bow, and 
holy Friar Tuck made his quarter-staff spin round 
his head like the sails of a windmill. Indeed, all 
our indigenous trees are glorious. The beech, the 
ash, the wych-elm, and even the so-called British 
elm, which, sooth to say, is only a naturalized alien 



no Redesdale's Further Memories 

that came to us from Italy and has been so long 
among us, living in trusty alliance with our natives, 
that we have come to treat him as our own — all 
these, in company with the oak, truly make up what 
Wordsworth called "a brotherhood of venerable 
trees." 

In Britain, and probably all over Europe, there 
is no tree which commands so much veneration as 
the oak. We talk of hearts of oak, and of the 
wooden walls of old England, and we endow our 
hoary, gnarled giants with all the attributes of 
stateliness and royal honour. One squire of high 
degree I once knew who, shortly before his death, 
thanking God for a long life, boasted, not that his 
eighty years had been spent in the practice of piety 
and virtue, as doubtless was the case, but that he 
had never cut down an oak. With the oaks we con- 
nect the stories of old British kings and the myster- 
ious liturgies of the golden-sickled Druids, those 
Brahmans of the Cassiterides — the Tin Islands — 
who, if we may believe Caesar and Pliny, who are 
our only authorities — for the priesthood, even if 
they could do so, might write down nothing — exer- 
cised power greater than those of popes. Woe to 
him who denied their authority or questioned their 
law ! For their excommunication was more terrible 
than that of Rome, making a man an outcast, a 
pariah, a social leper, with whom no man might 
deal or hold intercourse; for if he did, he, too, 
would fall under the awful ban. After a lapse of 



Trees and Their Legends in 

two thousand years we have heard of something of 
the same kind in our sister island. 

And our beloved Scotch fir! What of that true 
Briton? Happily there are still here and there in 
remote Highland glens a few of the old primeval 
forests of that great tree left. Probably the most 
picturesque of these is the King's forest of Balloch- 
bine, where you may see it in all the fullness of its 
nature — veterans borne down with age, stalwarts 
in full vigour, youngsters in their nonage, babies 
just born from the seed. Their red stems, glowing 
in the evening sun, spring out of a carpet of 
heather, blaeberries and ferns, among mossy rocks 
and lichen-starred stones. Close to them are their 
graceful consorts, the birches, which Lowell called 
"the most shy and ladylike of trees," drooping their 
delicate plumes over the pools and musical rills of 
brown peat-stained burns. What a succession of 
pictures, hard to beat, does this old forest of Bal- 
lochbine give ! And that is as it should be, for is it 
not the King's own? 

The happy union between the pine and the birch 
has been sung by some Scottish poet in a simple but 
touching Epithalamium : 

"The Pine's the King of Scottish glens : 

The Queen, ah! who is she? 
The fairest tree the forest kens. 
The bonnie birken tree I" 

We may be asked, since we have so grand a pine 
of our own, why import from abroad so many 



ii2 Redesdale's Further Memories 

aliens, many of which are certainly not its superiors 
in beauty ? I suppose that the answer must be that 
of the daily partridge which the domestically faith- 
less French king brought in argument against the 
remonstrances of his father-confessor. Besides, it 
can hardly be denied that many of them are ex- 
quisitely beautiful. One of the lovely blue spruces 
from Pike's Peak in Colorado, looking as if it had 
been dyed in the mystic waters of the Grotto Az- 
burra of Capri,* strikes an altogether new note in 
our garden landscape; the steeple of a tapering 
cypress will give that perpendicular line which is so 
valuable to a painter, as we may see in Italian gar- 
dens, in the picturesque cemeteries of Constanti- 
nople, and all over the Levant. A blue cedar from 
the Atlas range in North Africa, its branches 
feathered down to the ground in graceful pro- 
fusion, catches the slanting rays of the sun and 
sends them back to you as if its leaves were sprink- 
led with hoar-frost or wrought in some luminous 
metal. But it is idle to compile lists and catalogues. 
They make dull writing and duller reading. Suffice 
it to say that the intrinsic beauties of the many 
trees, shrubs, lianes and vines, which have been 
added to our own lovely flora, furnish an ample 
justification for their admission into our homes. 

But apart from this there is the collector's mania 
to be reckoned with. Most men take a pride in 
showing their friends some gem, some treasured 

* Picea pungens glauca. 



Trees and Their Legends "3 

rarity, and the gardener is as proud of his collec- 
tion of unique plants as the Hertfords, the Roths- 
childs and the Pierpont Morgans have been of their 
pictures and miniatures, their Sevres porcelain, or 
the masterpieces of Riesener Gouthiere and Caffieri. 
The plant collector has this advantage over those 
famous lovers of the living works of dead artists 
that he can gratify his whims and vanity so much 
more cheaply. 

"What brought Sir Visto's ill-got wealth to waste? 
Some Demon whispered— Visto, have a taste." 

Even orchids are cheap in comparison with Rem- 
brandts, Vandycks, Sir Joshuas and Gainsboroughs. 
It stands to reason that the gathering together of 
such treasures as may be seen at Westonbirt, at 
Aldenham, at Frensham, and in one or two other 
collector's gardens, cannot be achieved without a 
considerable expenditure of money, guided by con- 
summate knowledge; but, even so, the cost is 
relatively small. And the owners of lesser pleas- 
aunces with small outlay can profit by the exper- 
ience and public spirit of those gardening magnates, 
both professional and amateur, who combine to 
send out costly expeditions to new fields of adven- 
ture and discovery in order to add to the treasure 
stores of horticulture. 

If there be any who are so jealous of the honour 
of our British forests and woods that they resent 
any competition with their beauty, and look upon 
all new-comers from over the sea as undesirable 



ii4 Redesdale's Further Memories 

aliens, they should, at any rate, allow that, though 
they would be out of tune in a wild forest, they 
bring lovely harmonies of colour and form into the 
more artificial scenes with which we adorn the im- 
mediate surroundings of our country houses. They 
are no more foreign than the numberless flowers 
with which our predecessors used to furnish their 
beds and borders, and they have two great advan- 
tages over these, as I hope to show presently. 

As to the question of fitness or unfitness, that is 
a matter of conditions and arrangement. I know a 
vast park in which the old oaks and beeches used to 
make up a sylvan scene of incomparable grandeur. 
Some years ago the owner, fired with a new and 
wholly uneducated enthusiasm, studded with stately 
forest with lovely little Japanese maples, but with- 
out any intervening masses of cultivation to make 
the garden blend with the primeval trees. The ef- 
fect was deplorably ludicrous — nay, it was worse 
than ludricous : it was an act of desecration. Had 
my friend been more judicious, what charming ef- 
fects he might have conjured up in a suitable place 
with those same little crimson bushes which he con- 
demned to play so silly a part in among his glorious 
secular oaks! What magical scenes have been 
called up with their help at Westonbirt! But those 
pictures were produced by knowledge. 

There was a time when in spring and summer I 
used to look forward to the autumn, hailing its 
advent as the season of sport, when every day 



Trees and Their Legends 115 

brought some new joy. Now that I have left the 
autumn of life far behind me and am deep in its 
winter, I have no love left for the shortening days, 
the rustle of falling leaves, and the cold patter of the 
rain on the dimmed panes of glass. And yet when 
the sun shines, how beautiful is the Indian summer I 
How lovely the dismissal of the haze floating away 
across the valley! Yes! Autumn has its conso- 
lations. 

Foreigners who have never been in this country 
generally think that we live like newts and frogs 
in a land of marshes and dismal morasses, cur- 
tained by fogs through which the sun's rays never 
pierce, a land sadly breeding a mysterious disease 
which they call "Le spleen." In the fifties, as Dis- 
raeli once put it, they looked upon us as "an insular 
people subject to fogs, and possessing a powerful 
middle class," both, in their eyes, equally objection- 
able. All the greater was their surprise and admira- 
tion when they came to realize the soft loveliness 
of our landscapes. Sixty years ago and more I was 
sent home from Eton for a few days' change after 
some trifling ailment, and my father took me, and a 
French friend of his who was staying with him, to 
Richmond. Never shall I forget that man's as- 
tonished enthusiasm when the view from Rich- 
mond Hill burst upon his sight. 

It was, as good luck would have it, a rarely beau- 
tiful afternoon in October. The trees in the park 
were clothed in the golden russets of autumn. The 



u6 Redesdale's Further Memories 

sunlight was dancing upon the river running like a 
broad silver ribbon through the valley — a delicate 
blue mist threw an exquisitely diaphanous veil over 
the distance. Our friend, brought up in the fallacies 
of the French novelists of those days, lifted his 
hands in amazement and stood silent. 

It was my first sight of Richmond. I have 
travelled far and wide since then, and have seen 
many more startling scenes, but the haunting beauty 
of that autumn evening remains one of my happiest 
dreams. There is a mysterious charm in that land- 
scape, with the oaks which were veterans when 
Henry the Eighth hunted the deer under their 
boughs, the lush grass, and the Thames, that sacred 
river, for an Eton boy without its peer in the world. 
It is a scene which neither Alps nor Rockies, neither 
the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, nor the Great 
Wall of China, nor the wonders of the tropical 
jungle, can efface. And — it is home. 

Some thirty years ago when, as I have said, 
autumn was still the welcome herald of sport, I, 
happily inspired, laid the foundation of what to- 
day robs it of some of its sadness. Now that the 
stalls in my stable are empty and the guns lie idle in 
the racks of the gun-room, I reap the reward. I 
sent to America for acorns, I bought the seed of the 
giant Japanese vine (Vini coignettia) in Tokio. 
From Veitch (alas! for the death of a noble firm!) 
I procured specimens of all the species and varieties 
of Japanese maples : Thunberg's berberis, the Per- 



Trees and Their Legends 117 

sian parrottia — these, with the various forms of 
rhus and other choice plants, make up a palette of 
colours to cheer the dool of the dying year. In 
October one after another the maples begin to send 
up tongues of fire, setting the hill-side in flames. 

It is a rare treat to see the sun shining through 
the leaves of some trees red as the pigeon's-blood 
ruby; rare to see the fretted lace-work of others 
clothing them in a gorgeous panoply of old gold. 
Their neighbours are gleaming like the jewels in 
Oriental fable. The hollies and thorns and taller 
trees are draped with flamboyant curtains sent down 
by the huge vines — red, yellow, tawny orange, fes- 
toons falling in a riotous feast of colour. 

Among all these proud foreigners the more mod- 
est yet no less beautiful native spindle-tree suffers 
no eclipse. A little later the American oaks begin 
to assert themselves. These, a little while before 
they turn crimson, assume all the quality of an old 
Chinese bronze which the patina of time has painted 
with the many hues of Joseph's coat mysteriously 
blended together in an exquisite harmony. When 
we watch all these, we understand the poetry of the 
Japanese when they talk of their mountains and 
forests clothed in the brocade of the maples. 

It must be obvious that gardening, the object of 
which is the production of a succession of varied 
pictures which, being inspired by the observation of 
Nature in her many moods, might appeal to the art- 
istic taste of a painter or stir the emotion of a poet, 



1 18 Redesdale's Further Memories 

presents difficulties undreamt of by the flower-bed 
manufacturers of fifty or sixty years ago. Their 
gardening was all done with compasses and straight- 
edge, and the geometrical result, the eccentric 
"knottes" worked out in alternantheras, ecneverias, 
golden feather and the like, savoured of nothing 
nearer to nature than the Tottenham Court Road. 

Those were the days in which the garden, like 
the kitchen, was the special province of the mistress 
of the house. Of the latter she might know some- 
thing, of the former generally nothing ; and the con- 
sequence was that it was handed over to men, who, 
though they might be most admirable cultivators, 
had had no artistic training, had not had the op- 
portunity of learning by travel, and were content to 
carry on certain rule-of-thumb traditions, which 
turned out every man's garden in the likeness of 
that of every other man. In the uniformly unre- 
lieved brilliancy of geraniums, verbenas and calceo- 
larias, of imagination or poetry there was not a 
trace — not even the merit of invention. 

In his brilliant book, "Form and Colour/' Mr. 
March Phillips divides the human mind into two 
great categories — the intellectual and the emotional. 
The intellectual faculty is characteristic of the 
West, the emotional faculty prevails in the East. 
Next comes the question of Form and Colour in 
Art. "Form," he says, "has dominated Art when- 
ever and wherever the intellectual faculty was domi- 
nant in life; colour has dominated Art whenever and 



Trees and Their Legends 119 

wherever the emotional faculty has dominated life." 
Later in the book, when speaking of the contrast be- 
tween the Art of the West and the Art of the East, 
he proceeds : "Form, as we were saying, is chiefly a 
matter of the intellect. The arts which deal with 
form convey ideas. Their appeal is to the mind. 
Colour, on the other hand, conveys no ideas. [My 
italics.] It is emotional and appeals to the senses 
rather than to the intellect. And this being so, it 
seems natural that the Western temperament, intel- 
lectual rather than sensuous, should excel in form 
rather than in colour; while the Eastern, sensuous 
rather than intellectual, should excel in colour 
rather than in form." 

This theory of colour and form gives us much 
food for thought, and it is impossible not be struck 
by the aptness with which it may be applied to the 
gardener's craft. The gorgeous colour of the one 
school of gardening appeals directly to the senses, 
and, like other similar appeals where there is no 
relief from monotony, it soon satiates and wearies. 

The kaleidoscopic beds which remind us of Pallas 
Athene springing fully armed from the brain of 
Zeus, are at the outset the same as they will be four 
months later, when their glory will be ignominiously 
wheeled away to the rubbish heap. Day after day 
you look out from your window and there is no 
change — nothing but an eternal Oriental glare of 
scarlet and yellow. How can such a garden create 
ideas? Compare with this the garden of form. 



120 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Here there is plenty to excite ideas and fire the im- 
agination, for here you have life with all its changes 
and accidents, from the tender birth of the bud to 
the vigour of the mature plant, the loves of the 
flowers, and the happy ripening of the fruit, which 
is the mystery of maternity. 

No two days are alike; as they follow one 
another, each brings with it something new, some 
fresh beauty, some intimate revelation of Nature's 
secrets. And when the year has nearly run its 
course, when the autumn leaves fall to the ground 
in a shower of gold such as that which broke 
through Danae's prison, there is no death or decay 
of the plant, no carting off to the fosse commune, 
but just a long, happy winter's sleep, enviable as 
that of a dormouse resting in the sure hope of a 
glorious new birth when the first kiss of spring shall 
awaken the sleeping beauty in the wood. 

Colour, then, is of the East sensuous ; form is of 
the West intellectual. It is, of course, a mere coin- 
cidence, and not a rule capable of being laid down ; 
but as I was walking to-day in a garden of form 
with Mr. Phillips' theory seething in my brain, I 
could not but be struck by noting that, besides our 
own native trees, by far the greater number of those 
that have been naturalized here for the sake of their 
shape are of Western origin; while, with the ex- 
ception of the American oaks, those that we value 
for their gorgeous colouring — such, for instance, 



Trees and Their Legends 121 

as the Japanese maples and vines — come to us from 
the East. 

It is hardly worth noticing, but it was certainly 
curious that, wherever I looked, there I saw form 
transported from the West. The caravans which 
crossed the Rocky Mountains in search of gold, not 
without leaving many skeletons by the way; the 
orchid hunters of the Amazon, braving sickness, 
fevers and poisoned arrows, have enriched our pleas- 
aunces with treasures, not to speak of the brilliantly- 
coloured gems of which they were primarily in 
search, which, could our grandfathers, and even 
our fathers, come to life again, would make them 
open their eyes wide with astonishment, wondering 
whether some magician could have waved his wand 
over their cherished grounds, changing them into 
fairyland. 

The diplomatists, who opened up Japan in 1858, 
the pioneers of trade, who have penetrated into the 
secret places of Western China, carrying their lives 
in their hands, have all added to our wealth of 
plants, both in form and colour, but chiefly in 
colour. When we see the glorious velvety shafts 
of Lawson's Cypress, or Libocedrus decurreus, 
shooting up heavenward like church spires, when 
we look upon the great American conifers, so rich 
and so various, or among the lowlier plants, are 
startled by the huge leaves of the Chilian Gunneras, 
we cannot but admit that for form we have to thank 
the West. 



122 Redesdale's Further Memories 

In a later chapter, in the course of a fascinating 
disquisition on Byzantine architecture, Mr. Phillips 
goes on to say: "We must recognize that between 
these ideas of colour and softness there is some- 
thing more than an accidental connection . . . 
softness and colour go together as naturally as 
hardness and form." 

These are words which might be applied with 
special fitness to the garden. But although form is 
of its very essence hard, so far as outlines are con- 
cerned, we are not without one corrective which 
softens and subdues it. That corrective is atmos- 
phere. 

I hold, and I think that most fellow-craftsmen, if 
I may dare to reckon myself among gardeners, will 
agree with me, that background is absolutely essen- 
tial to success ; yet if you place a statue, or plant a 
specimen tree, immediately against the finest back- 
ground that imagination could desire, it will re- 
main hard and shorn of much of its charm, because 
it will lack the softening influence of atmosphere. 

I know no better illustration of this than the way 
in which the Venus of Milo is shown at the Louvre. 
It is so skillfully placed that the air plays all round 
it, and the outlines of the marble melt, as it were, 
into the surrounding atmosphere. Were it pressed, 
as statues so often are, close against a curtain or a 
dead wall, the supreme beauty of the goddess would 
be cruelly sacrificed. The form, the inspiration of 
the sculptor, would be there, but the hardness of the 



Trees and Their Legends 123 

material would be unredeemed; it would represent 
death instead of life. That is why so many photo- 
graphic portraits fail to render beauty. The model 
is placed immediately in front of a screen — all 
sense of aerial perspective is lost — and the result is, 
from an artistic point of view, a deadly failure, 
even should the photograph be technically perfect, 
so far as optics and chemistry are concerned. No 
composition is good, or even tolerable, where aerial 
perspective is neglected, and that is as true in gar- 
dening as it is in the plastic arts. 

It is the lack of aerial perspective — in other 
words, of atmosphere — which so fatally mars the 
very real beauty of Oriental art. In the paintings 
of the Chinese artists, and the extravagantly- 
admired coloured prints of the famous wood en- 
gravers of Japan, there is often a rare skill of colour 
and a firmness of hand worthy of Giotto, especially 
in the matchless drawing of flowing lines such as 
drapery. The birds and trees and grasses of the 
Kano school, the lovely outlines of the landscape 
painters, the monkeys and deer of Chosen, are in 
many respects wonderful. But there is almost al- 
ways something wanting. For want of aerial per- 
spective the lines remain rigid; there is no soft 
atmospheric roundness, and on that account the pic- 
tures fail to satisfy. The result is like the fascinat- 
ing work of very clever children. 

Compare with the vaunted eighteenth-century 
art of Japan the contemporary work of the French 



124 Redesdale's Further Memories 

painters, Watteau, Lancret, Fragonard, who, to my 
mind, have never been excelled in their rendering of 
the mystery of atmosphere. See how their wood- 
land scenes melt into unfathomable distances like 
those of the great Dutchmen, such as Cuyp and 
others. There you have the poetry of nature and of 
gardens, and when you are laying out your domain 
and combining your succession of pictures and sur- 
prises, ask yourself this question : Would Watteau 
have found here anything worthy of his brush ? To 
be sure you cannot have his pretty powdered dames, 
and his musical courtiers, with their viols and tabors 
and flutes. But they were mere accessories. That 
which so obviously gave him the greatest joy — that 
upon which he bestowed his supreme skill — was the 
scenery in which he placed them to give it life, even 
though that life should have something of a mere- 
tricious and theatrical character. 

If it be true, according to Phillips, that softness 
and colour, hardness and form, go together, we can 
account for the prevalence of the garden of mere 
colour in the days when the lady of the house ruled 
the gardener. The garden of colour is feminine 
and emotional; the garden of form masculine and 
intellectual — it is the garden of the master. 

And here we come to something akin to the Chin- 
ese doctrine of Yang and Yin, the male and female 
principles ruling creation. The garden of form be- 
longs to Yang, the garden of colour to Yin. This 
is not intended in any way to undervalue the wo- 



Trees and Their Legends 125 

man's influence. It is only natural that a woman 
who is all softness and emotion should surround 
herself with effects which mirror her own sweet 
nature. The man, on the other hand, strong and 
hard, will be inclined to try and imitate the sterner 
pictures of creation. He will work in what Addison 
called the Pindaric style "without affecting the 
nicer elegancies of Art." 

Take the books which have been written upon the 
subject; their name is legion. The women's books, 
full of delicate charm, busy themselves for the most 
part with the marriage of colours, the blending of 
hues, the reconciliation of hostile shades. They are 
very clever, very ingenious, very attractive; but, 
setting on one side a few of the great lady writers, 
among whom Miss Willmott and Miss Jekyll are 
queens, they represent no more than the millinery of 
plants — the stockings to match the frock. 

Set against these the rugged masculine vigour of 
a writer like William Robinson, the man to whom, 
above all others, is due the notable improvement 
which has grown in horticultural taste during the 
last forty years. From him you will learn much, 
for he knows much, and he can teach it. If you 
have his book, "The English Flower Garden," you 
will need no other, for it will give you all the knowl- 
edge which you require. Among the women's 
books, as I have said, there are, of course, delight- 
ful exceptions; but of the bulk of them the best 
that can be said is that they are gentle and morally 



126 Redesdale's Further Memories 

innocuous. For all that is delicate and charming 
and alluring, joined to many of the highest and 
robust qualities which adorn mankind, I have been 
all my life a worshipper of the Yin principle; but 
when it comes to gardening and the writing of 
books on gardening, give me the Yang, give me 
William Robinson. 

All men love trees, and it is small wonder that 
the sight of objects so beautiful should have led 
men to think of them with awe as under the special 
care, or even as the dwelling-places, of gods and 
goddesses; indeed, the connection of trees with re- 
ligion is as old as the conception of the deity itself. 
North and south, east and west, we find the same 
idea. 

In the Scandinavian Sagas the mystic Ash 
Ygdrasil is the tree of life, of time, and of space 
Its branches spread over the whole world and its 
top reaches above the heavens. Its roots strike in 
three directions : the one down to Hvergelmer, the 
well of the dragon Nidhug; the second to the foun- 
tain of Mimer, the source of wisdom and wit, for a 
drink of which Odin pawned his eye with Mimer; 
the third is in Asgard, close to the fountain of Urd 
the Norn of the Past, where the gods, riding over 
the Bifrodh Bridge — the rainbow — assemble to sit 
in judgment. Here dwell the three Norns : Urd the 
Norn of the Past, Verdande the Norn of the Pres- 
ent, and Skuld the Norn of the Future; and here 



Trees and Their Legends 127 

they weave the web of faith for you and me and all 
mankind. 

It is strange how men have been fascinated by 
the rough and rugged Icelandic mythology born of 
ice and snow and rocks lashed by glacial winds; 
and nights that are light as day, days that are black 
as night; an existence which was one long fight 
against the elements, and struggle for life with 
bears and wolves. The Roman poets, on the other 
hand, born in the soft, voluptuous creed of the 
Greeks, a religion in which the gods and goddesses, 
much too human, were worshipped in temples built 
amid the enchanting fragrance of roseleaf islands, 
shuddered at the very idea of the North. For them 
there would have been nothing but terror in those 
strong Sagas, which in other countries gave birth to 
noble poetry and stately music. 

As told by Ovid, the story of the punishment 
of Erisichthon, who mocked the gods and would 
not sacrifice at their altars, illustrates the worship 
of trees and also the dread of the inhospitable 
North, and yet a North that was no Arctic region ; 
nothing, indeed, more terrible than the Caucasus. 

In ancient Thessaly, in the midst of a wood 
sacred to Ceres, there stood an oak, a sturdy vet- 
eran, a grove in itself, covered with votive offerings, 
the tokens of the honour which was paid to it. 
Round it the Dryads, hand in hand, were wont to 
hold their choirs and dance in festive revelry. It 



128 Redesdale's Further Memories 

was a holy tree, but in spite of all its sanctity, 
against it Erisichthon raised his sacrilegious axe 
and bade his men strike home, swearing, when they 
hesitated, that were the tree not merely dear to the 
goddess, but if it were the goddess herself, it should 
lie low and kiss the earth with its topmost boughs. 
Under the stroke of the axe the sacred tree groaned ; 
its leaves and acorns, and even the branches turned 
pale. But when the impious hand inflicted the first 
cruel wound, blood flowed as from a bull at a sacri- 
fice before the altars. Horrified, the men were 
stricken dumb, and one, bolder than the others, 
would fain have put a stop to the crime and stayed 
the falling axe. 

"Be this the guerdon of thy piety?" cried the 
Thessalian, turning the weapon against the man; 
severed his head from his body, and repeated his 
attack upon the tree. From the heart of the oak 
there came a voice, saying, "Under this tree am I, 
a nymph beloved by Ceres, and my dying prophecy 
is that thy deeds shall be punished as the consolation 
for my death." Nothing stops him from his crime; 
at last, under the many blows, and dragged by ropes, 
the tree collapses, and with its weight breaks down 
much of the grove. 

The mourning Dryads, stricken by their loss, don 
black robes and pray to Ceres for the punishment 
of Erisichthon. The goddess nods assent; she 
shakes the fields heavy with crops, and contrives 
for him a punishment which would be pitiable had 



Trees and Their Legends 129 

he not forfeited pity by his deeds, dooming him to 
be destroyed by pestilential hunger. But since this 
may not be attempted by the goddess herself, for 
the fates will not that Ceres and famine should co- 
exist, she charges one of the mountain nymphs to 
summon Famine from the cold and bleak shores of 
Scythia, that barren land where there is neither 
corn nor tree — the abode of dull frost, pallor, shiv- 
ering and hunger. Thus does the goddess punish 
the impious sinner, and so she tortures him until he 
is driven to gnaw at his own limbs. (Ovid. Met. 
740.) Ovid's description of hunger as a distinct 
being called to wreak vengeance is as gruesome as 
anything that I know of in poetry. 

The idea that trees are inhabited by super- 
natural beings, spirits or lesser gods, is common 
enough in the folk-lore of all countries, and that 
is what has given rise to the fables of trees which 
bleed and utter cries if they are cruelly treated. In 
Japan there are endless pretty and fanciful stories, 
in which the spirits of beautiful trees — often their 
matchless cherry trees — fall in love with and be- 
witch the sons or daughters of men. Nothing is 
prettier in that country, so rich in beauty, than the 
Shinto shrines nestling in choice spots among the 
forest-clad mountains. Around each temple are 
planted trees which are sacred to, and under the 
special protection of, the tutelary deity of the place. 
And in connection with them there is a custom 
called "Ushi no Toki Mairi" (Going to worship 



130 Redesdale's Further Memories 

at the hour of the ox).* It is practised by jealous 
women who wish to be revenged on their faithless 
lovers or husbands, and reminds us of those waxen 
dolls with which the witches and adepts in black 
magic of the Middle Ages, and in ancient Greece, 
according to Theocritus, were wont to pretend that 
they could rid their patron of their enemies. 

When the world is at rest, at two in the morning, 
the hour of which the ox is the symbol, the woman 
rises; she dons a white robe and high sandals or 
clogs ; her coif is a metal tripod in which are thrust 
three lighted candles; round her neck she hangs a 
mirror, which falls upon her bosom ; in her left hand 
she carries a small straw figure, the effigy of the 
lover who has deserted her, and in her right she 
grasps a hammer and nails, with which she fastens 
the figure to one of the sacred trees which surround 
the shrine. There she prays for the death of the 
traitor, vowing that if her petition be heard she will 

* The Japanese, following the horology of the Chinese, used to 
divide the day of 24 hours into 12 periods, each of which had its 
sign, something like the sign of the Zodiac. 

Midnight until 2 a.m. was the hour of the Rat 

Ox 
Tiger 
Hare 
" " Dragon 

Snake 
Horse 
Ram 
Ape 
Cock 
Hog 
Fox 



2 a.m. 


11 


4 a.m. 


4 a.m. 


» 


6 a.m. 


6 a.m. 


i> 


8 a.m. 


8 a.m. 


M 


10 a.m. 


10 a.m. 


>> 


12 noon 


12 noon 


» 


2 p.m. 


2 p.m. 


ft 


4 p.m. 


4 p.m. 


II 


6 p.m. 


6 p.m. 


M 


8 p.m. 


8 p.m. 


>> 


10 p.m. 


xo p.m. 


>> 


midnight 



Trees and Their Legends 131 

herself pull out the nails which now offend the god 
by wounding the mystic tree. Night after night she 
comes to the shrine, and each night she drives in 
two or more nails, believing that every nail will 
shorten her lover's life, for the god, to save his 
beloved tree, will surely strike him dead.* 

Whether this custom still prevails, I know not. 
Fifty years ago I was assured that it was "very 
much alive." Habits have undergone a mighty 
change since then, but superstition dies hard, and 
there are many out-of-the-way places even in Japan 
into which the newness of things has hardly pene- 
trated. It must have been a ghostly sight to meet 
a maiden thus harnessed in the grove of the god on 
a dark night. 

Lafcadio Hearn, that wayward child of the 
muses, a prose poet if ever there was such an one, 
who, after wandering for many years through un- 
told misery and suffering, at last found rest and his 
soul in Japan, has left to us as precious legacies 
many a rare conceit which would fit in well here. It 
would have been strange if he, a mystic himself, 
had not been willingly haunted by the folk-lore of 
the country which he loved, a country "fabulosa et 
externis miraculis adsimilata." Sometimes, indeed, 
he was more Catholic than the Pope, living in Japan 
that was almost a dreamland of his own wild fancy. 
And yet he was a creature of curious contradic- 

* See my "Tales of Old Japan : the Loves of Gompachi and 
Komurasaki." 



132 Redesdale's Further Memories 

tions, for he seems to be half in earnest, half mock- 
ing, when he holds us spellbound with weird tales 
of goblin trees, luring men to love or to death; of 
a camellia tree which listens to the prayers of 
lovers ; of other camellias which, like spectres, walk 
about at night, the terror of mankind. "There was 
one in the garden of a Matsne Samurai which did 
this so much that it had to be cut down. Then it 
writhed its arms and groaned, and blood spurted at 
every stroke of the axe." 

Like every other writer, native and foreign, Laf- 
cadio Hearn is entranced by the loveliness of the 
cherry blossom, the emblem of all that is bodily 
delicate and spiritually beautiful. He quotes an old 
stanza, which says: "If one should ask you con- 
cerning the heart of a true Samurai, point to the 
mountain cherry flower gleaming in the morning 
sun." Again : "As the cherry flower is first among 
flowers, so should the warrior be first among men." 
By this nature-loving people, the highest form of 
female beauty and excellence is symbolized by the 
willow for grace, the cherry flower for youthful 
charm, the plum blossom for virtue and sweetness. 
I should add that the oval outline of the melon seed 
represents in the shape of the face the type of high 
breeding and aristocratic distinction. The poets 
are never weary of drawing upon the cherry flower 
for their metaphors. A Japanese gentleman, look- 
ing out upon a snow-storm, will say: "See how the 
petals of the cherries are drifting before the wind." 



Trees and Their Legends 133 

The Yanagi — the weeping willow — is a much 
haunted tree. Here is a story told by Lafcadio 
Hearn which is worth quoting : 

"There is a rather pretty legend — recalling the 
old Greek dream of Dryads — about a willow tree 
which grew in the garden of a Samurai of Kyoto. 
Owing to its weird reputation, the tenant of the 
homestead desired to cut it down; but another 
Samurai dissauded him, saying: 'Rather sell it to 
me, that I may plant it in my garden. That tree 
has a soul ; it were cruel to destroy its life.' Thus 
purchased and transplanted, the Yanagi nourished 
well in its new home, and its spirit, out of gratitude, 
took the form of a beautiful woman, and became 
the wife of the Samurai who had befriended it. A 
charming boy was the result of this union. A few 
years later the Daimio to whom the ground belonged 
gave orders that the tree should be cut down. Then 
the wife wept bitterly, and for the first time re- 
vealed to her husband the whole story. 'And now/ 
she added, T know that I must die, but our child will 
live and you will always love him. This thought is 
my only solace.' Vainly the astonished husband 
sought to retain her. Bidding him farewell for 
ever, she vanished into the tree. Needless to say, 
that the Samurai did everything in his power to per- 
suade the Daimio to forgo his purpose. The prince 
wanted the tree for the reparation of a great Budd- 
hist temple, the Sanjiusangendo." (The Temple of 
the 33,333 images of Kwannon, the Goddess of 



1 34 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Mercy.) "The tree was felled, but, having fallen, 
it suddenly became so heavy that three hundred men 
could not move it. Then the child, taking a branch 
in his little hand, said 'Come,' and the tree followed 
him, gliding along the ground to the court of the 
temple." 

You may bless the Yanagi for offering you a 
sure cure for the toothache. Haunted it is bound 
to be, and if you suffer, drive nails into it until the 
spirit of the tree, to save its home, relieves you of 
the pain. Are you a dreamer of dreams ? Then if 
your climate be mild, without fail, see that you are 
not without a Nanten among your shrubs. Hide 
it away in some sheltered spot, both for its own sake 
and for yours, and let it be your trusted confidant. 
If the gods should send you evil and racking dreams, 
rise early and whisper the terror to your Nanten, 
and it shall come to naught. Science has corrupted 
the Japanese name Nanten into Nandina, and, for 
some reason best known to themselves, botanists 
have added the altogether ridiculous and senseless 
suffix domestica. Perhaps such an outrage may 
have robbed the plant of its virtues ; we can but try 
it. 

To go back to our cherries. In the grounds of 
an old Scottish castle, rich in ghostly stories and 
blood-curdling legends, there stands an old gean 
tree (wild cherry). It is the belief of the country- 
side that this old tree is haunted by the spirit of a 
former mistress of the castle, a lady who, as tradi- 



Trees and Their Legends 135 

tion has it, suffered much in her life-time and can- 
not rest in death. One day, some forty years ago, 
I started off from a neighbouring place to pay a 
visit at the castle with "Hang- theology" Rogers, 
the famous rector of St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, 
than whom no brighter companion ever cheered a 
long, cold drive in a rather rickety dog-cart. We 
arrived just as the large party in the house were 
gathering together in the drawing-room after 
luncheon. We were met by long and rather pale 
faces. Obviously something had happened — no- 
body seemed at ease. At last an old lady, who was 
among the guests, took me on one side and told me 
what all this meant. 

That morning, a visitor who was driving up to 
the house, when he came to the gean tree, saw the 
figure of a woman come out of it, glide for some 
distance beside him, and then vanish. Many of the 
people in the castle, who happened to be looking out 
of the drawing-room window at the time, saw the 
wonder, and the old lady added that she herself, 
having gone up to her bedroom to put on her bonnet, 
distinctly saw the apparition from her window, 
which was immediately over the drawing-room. All 
these people were absolutely convinced that, like the 
visitor in his dog-cart, they had seen the ghost 
which haunted the gean tree. I have told the story 
without addition or ornament, exactly as I heard 
it an hour or two after its occurrence and while the 
witnesses were still under the spell. It could not 



136 Redesdale's Further Memories 

fail to remind me of the tales of Bakemonozakura, 
the haunted cherry trees of Japanese legend, and it 
seemed worthy to be set down beside them. 

The ancient Egyptians, though they worshipped 
onions and garlic, for which they were handsomely 
ridiculed by Juvenal, seem to have paid little respect 
to trees, probably because, besides the palm, so few 
were known to them. There is, however, according 
to that wonderful book, Sir James Fraser's "Golden 
Bough," some evidence to show that they believed 
that spirits haunted trees ; at any rate, the tamarisk 
was sacred to Osiris — the god and ruler who rep- 
resented the principle of good, as his brother Typho 
did that of evil. The story of the death of Osiris 
is curious as a contradiction of the idea of immortal- 
ity with which deity is usually endowed. The god, 
having become King of Egypt, devoted himself to 
the civilization of his people, and to further that 
end, set out to travel over the world, leaving his 
wife Isis to reign in his place. When he came back, 
Typho, with other conspirators, among whom was 
an Ethiopian queen, named Aso, plotted to kill his 
brother. So, having procured the exact measure- 
ment of Osiris, he caused a box to be made to fit 
him, and having invited Osiris to a feast, he caused 
the box, which was of rare workmanship, to be 
brought in, saying he would give it to any one pres- 
ent whom it would fit. All the guests tried it in 
vain ; at last Osiris laid himself down in it, and the 
conspirators, rushing forward, fastened down the 



Trees and Their Legends 137 

lid with nails and molten lead. Then the box was 
carried to the riverside. It floated down the stream 
and was carried by the waves of the sea to the coast 
of Byblos, and lodged in the branches of a tamarisk 
bush. There is much more of this fable in Sir 
Gardner Wilkinson's great book — not all of it very 
edifying reading; but that is how the tamarisk be- 
came a sacred tree. 

While treating of the superstitions and legends 
belonging to trees, it has been impossible to avoid 
touching upon the belief in ghosts. That faith 
exists in every part of the world. The fetichists 
of the African priests, the totemists of North Amer- 
ica, the wildest savages of the South Seas with their 
uncouth idols, the aborigines of Australia and New 
Zealand — all stand in terror of ghosts. I long years 
ago translated a collection of Pekingese stories of 
haunted houses; but in many moves and journeys 
the manuscript has been lost — no great matter of 
regret, for these tales are always the same, the two 
leading causes for apparitions being remorse or 
revenge. The story of the ghost of Sakura Sogoro, 
perhaps the most famous ghost story of the Far 
East, which I have translated in my "Tales of Old 
Japan," has, apart from its local colouring, no fea- 
ture differing from many such traditions which 
have been handed down in Europe. But the true 
interest of these superstitions, call them fables, 
myths — what you will — lies in the proof that all 
over the world there is implanted in man the instinc- 



138 Redesdale's Further Memories 

tive conviction that death is not the end of all things 
— the mere return of dust to dust, of ashes to ashes ; 
if that were so, there could be no thought of ghosts. 
The belief depends upon the existence of that mys- 
terious intuitive feeling that when the thread of fate 
has been severed, there still remains another life 
which death itself cannot kill, and that other life is 

the soul. 

***** 

But the fairies — where are they ? Can it be that 
the Bakemono-zakura — the haunted cherry trees of 
Japan — when they were ruthlessly torn out of the 
soil of the country of the gods ten years ago, in- 
dignantly burst their barken bonds, and taking wing 
for refuge to the sacred groves of Mount Fugi, 
from some wild bird's eyrie watched their beloved 
old homes being wafted away to new and uncertain 
climes across the terrors of the Pacific Ocean ? And 
yet often, even here, I see a merry band of flaxen- 
haired dwarfs playing about the enchanted trees. 
Fairyland is rich in surprises and mystifications. 
Who knows ? Perhaps these little sprites are them- 
selves fairies who have chosen for their abode the 
forsaken dwellings of the dark eastern Bakemono 
— "good folk" sent by a kindly Providence to shed 
a fleeting ray of sunshine of poetry over the wintry 
prose of an octogenarian's life. 



CHAPTER V 
Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 

RARELY, indeed, does the student in history- 
come across two personalities so entirely 
in unison at almost all points as those of 
the Austrian Empress Maria Theresia and our own 
Queen Victoria. Both were essentially great sov- 
ereigns, both essentially good women. Our own 
Queen exercised an authority which was in one 
sense even more remarkable than that of the Em- 
press; for whereas the latter was a commanding 
figure in an age when the glamour of autocracy had 
not yet faded away, Queen Victoria, by sheer force 
of character, maintained the prestige of royalty 
against the flowing tide of a democracy which was 
becoming daily more and more self-asserting. In- 
deed, she did more than maintain it — she summoned 
it from the dead; for in the two reigns which pre- 
ceded hers it had perished, as men then thought, 
without hope of resurrection. 

In all save their outward appearance the likeness 
between the two august ladies was such that it al- 
most seemed as if the one was the reincarnation of 
the other ; as if the soul of the mighty Austrian had 
passed into the Queen. An earnest and deep piety 

139 



140 Redesdale's Further Memories 

was the foundation of both characters, though they 
would have been utterly opposed in the form of its 
exercise. Maria Theresia was the faithful daugh- 
ter of the Church of Rome, Queen Victoria the no 
less faithful and loving child of the Reformation. 
In both religion was a passion. 

There has been a recent republication of the 
"Memoirs of Frau Pichler," the Viennese poetess 
and authoress, whose salon at the end of the eight- 
eenth and during the early part of the nineteenth 
century was so famous that people said that there 
were two thing which no stranger coming to Vienna 
could afford to miss seeing — St. Stephen's Cathe- 
dral and Frau Pichler. Those memoirs, admirably 
edited and furnished with copious notes by one 
Emil Bliimml, throw an interesting light upon the 
private and intimate life of Maria Theresia, and 
as we follow these reminiscences, we cannot but be 
struck by the many links in the chain of similarity 
of which I have spoken above. 

Both Queen Victoria and the Empress were 
deeply penetrated with that sense of the Royal 
Caste which is too apt to raise an insurmountable 
boundary against social intercourse. But if Royalty 
itself stands apart, there is also an instinctive 
aloofness from it in those who are of high position 
but yet subjects; so that the intimacies of Sover- 
eigns and royal personages are found rather among 
their personal attendants than among the nobles 
and powerful officials who form their courts. Es- 




THL EMPRESS MARIE THERESIA 
From an engraving after a painting by Meytens 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 141 

pecially is this bound to be the case where princesses 
are concerned. Their tirewomen and dressers are 
far more capable than chamberlains and secretaries 
of state of judging their private idiosyncrasies ; so, 
in order to know what manner of woman this or 
that queen may have been, we are fain to climb the 
backstairs — where such a way is open to us, as it is 
in the case of Maria Theresia. 

The adoption of Frau Pichler's mother by the 
great Empress is just such a pathetic story, not 
without a pinch of the salt of romance, as would 
have touched the kind heart of Queen Victoria, and, 
indeed, we can well fancy her in like circumstances 
behaving exactly as Maria Theresia did. 

In the month of May, 1744, the Wolfenbiittel 
Regiment of Infantry was moved from Hungary 
to Vienna. A poor old lieutenant, fifty years of 
age, named Friedrich Hieronymus, a widower, had 
contrived — with what pains and anxiety who can 
tell ? — to take with him on the march his only child, 
a little daughter aged four. Hardly had he reached 
Vienna when he caught a chill, inflammation of the 
lungs set in and he died, full of terror for the future 
of his little Charlotte, whom he was to leave penni- 
less and destitute in what was to him a foreign 
country, among strangers professing a religion 
which was abhorrent to him — for he was a Protes- 
tant. His last tender words were for her. "Poor 
child ! what will become of thee ?" Throughout her 
long life those painfully uttered words, torn from 



142 Redesdale's Further Memories 

the dying man's soul, remained graven in her heart, 
unforgettable. His brother officers, good charitable 
souls, probably themselves none, too well furnished 
with this world's goods, took charge of the babe, 
who became from thenceforth the "fille du Regi- 
ment." The pathetic story came to the ears of 
Maria Theresia, who had a soft place in her heart 
for the Wolfenbiittel Regiment, which was named 
after the family of her mother, the Empress Eliza- 
beth. She sent for the child, but the officers of the 
regiment, deeply imbued with a sense of loyalty to 
their dead comrade, did all that was in their power 
to hinder the babe from falling into the hands of 
an aggressively religious Catholic. 

They hid her in a suburb of Vienna, but the Em- 
press's agents were too clever for them, and the 
child was brought to Court, where, as the Wolfen- 
biittels had foreseen, she was brought up in the 
strictest doctrines of the Roman Church, under the 
charge of a Spanish lady, Isabella Duplessis, and 
was especially educated with a view to entering the 
Empress's service as tirewoman. Her life was now 
very different from what might have been expected 
for the baby that followed the drum. She became 
the playmate of the Imperial children, amongst 
them of the unhappy Queen Marie Antoinette, and 
so the years went by in all the luxury of a sumptu- 
ous court. 

Little Charlotte proved herself worthy of her 
good fortune; indeed, so quick and nimbi e-witted 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 143 

was she, that when she had reached the age of thir- 
teen she was already deemed fit to enter upon her 
duties about her great mistress, not only as tire- 
woman, but also as reader. To this end she had 
been early handed over to the care of Grafin Fuchs, 
the tenderly-loved nurse and governess of the Em- 
press, who had such an affection for her that when 
she died she was buried in the vault of the Capucins, 
the last home of the Imperial Family. 

In spite of the advice given by Hippolochus to 
Glaucus, it is not always an unmixed advantage so 
to excel as to make oneself indispensable. This lit- 
tle Charlotte soon found out, for her skill in hair- 
dressing was such that the Empress, who was so 
particular about her hair that she would sometimes 
have it done and undone four or five times before 
she was satisfied, could not do without her. Maria 
Theresia, who was without a spark of coquetry 
and had neither eyes nor thought for any man but 
her husband, had all a woman's instinctive love of 
display, and took a great delight in her beauty for 
its own sake. 

None of the other tirewomen had Charlotte's 
cunning fingers, and the same thing applied to her 
reading. German, French, Italian and Latin came 
to the child with equal facility, and all these were 
found in the dispatches which she had to read aloud 
to the Empress. French and Italian were the lan- 
guages of the Opera and of the elegances of the 
Court. On one occasion when the Empress was ex- 



144 Redesdale's Further Memories 

pecting a baby, she had a bet with Count Dietrich- 
stein as to the sex of the infant. She wagered for 
a girl, he for a boy — the Empress won. The count 
sent her a piece of porcelain with a portrait of him- 
self kneeling, and these words written by Metas- 
tasio, the Poet Laureate of the Court : 

"Perdo, e ver, 1' augusta figlia 
A pagar m' ha condannato, 
Ma s' e ver che a te somiglia 
Tutto il mondo ha guadagnato." 

A pretty compliment ! The babe, Marie Antoinette, 
born to be Queen of Beauty and of Sorrow, was 
worthy of it. 

Talking of languages, it is strange to read of how 
small account German was at the Court of Vienna. 
The Emperor Francis L, as a Lorrainer, hardly 
understood it and never spoke it, and the people of 
his service were mostly Lorrainers or Nether- 
landers. The Empress herself did not speak correct 
German; she used the vulgarest Viennese patois, 
and Frau Pichler tells an amusing story of how a 
young Saxon lady, who had been appointed as one 
of her mother's colleagues, came to her in despair 
one morning to beg her help. The Empress had 
ordered her to go and fetch "das blabe Buich." 
What could Her Majesty mean? Charlotte laughed, 
and told her to go and get "das blaue Buch." The 
Saxon girl, Karoline Mercier, would not believe 
her — but the blue book it was. If she could not 
master German, the Empress, like Queen Victoria, 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 145 

was familiar with French and Italian. Our Queen 
was very fond of showing her fluency in German 
and French, and on her drives would often stop 
her carriage for the joy of a chat with some poor 
Italian organ-grinder in his own soft tongue. 
Latin, which the Empress knew intimately, was the 
means of communication with her Hungarian mag- 
nates. She loved the language and them, for so she 
was reminded of the day — the nth of September, 
1 741 — when she, threatened by half Europe with 
the loss of the states which the hostile Powers had 
once guaranteed, went to Pressburg, met the nobles 
of Hungary in their parliament, and appealed to 
them for protection for herself and her child, the 
future Emperor Joseph. Her cry for help was not 
in vain. Touched to the quick by the sight of the 
lovely weeping Empress, the proud Magyars, old 
and young, the flower of a noble chivalry, drew their 
swords and swore to die for the beautiful woman, 
who was their King. A universal conscription was 
decreed. It was a triple triumph, upon which she 
loved to look back — the triumph of Virtue, of Right, 
and last, but not least, of Beauty. 

The service of Maria Theresia's handmaidens 
was no sinecure. In summer she rose at five 
o'clock — in winter a little later — and rang for her 
girls, who had to appear fully dressed in hoop- 
petticoats, and with the marvellous edifices of hair 
which the fashion of the day exacted. To achieve 
this, the young ladies had to get up in the middle 



146 Redesdale's Further Memories 

of the night, and this was especially hard upon 
Charlotte, who had night after night to read aloud 
for long hours after the Empress had gone to bed. 
But Charlotte was so quick, and knew the Em- 
press's taste so well that, whatever happened, she 
must be present at the morning toilette, and ready- 
to attend upon her mistress during and after sup- 
per — a light meal, of which Her Majesty always 
partook in her private room. Busy worker as the 
Empress was, she seems to have depended entirely 
upon having her State papers read aloud to her, 
and so Charlotte became acquainted very early in 
life with many important State secrets. But she 
was a discreet little soul and knew how to hold her 
tongue, and so retained the confidence of her Im- 
perial mistress as long as that wonderful woman 
lived. 

The portrait which Frau Pichler has left behind 
her of the great lady, partly drawn from her 
mother's stories of her, partly from her own mem- 
ories of the days when as a little girl she used to 
be taken by special command to Schonbrunn or the 
Burg in Vienna, is fascinating. In her youth the 
Empress had been extremely beautiful, and though 
in middle life she grew large and unwieldy, and had 
to be taken up to her rooms in a lift — wafted 
through the air by fairies, as it seemed to the child 
whom she took with her — she retained to the end 
that wonderful gift of grace and of what is called 
"presence," which is so keenly felt and so impossible 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 147 

to describe. Kindly she was, too, and of a motherly 
sweetness with children. Frau Pichler tells us how 
on one occasion, when the Empress had sent her to 
an adjoining room on some small errand, she slipped 
and fell, breaking her fan, and burst into tears. 
The kind Empress hurried after her, comforted 
her, and gave her a new fan — a precious relic, to be 
treasured as we may well believe for a lifetime. 

Maria Theresia was the daughter of the Emperor 
Charles the Sixth, who, being without a male heir, 
named her as his successor by "pragmatic sanction" 
— a Byzantine term for an ordinance issued arbit- 
rarily by the head of an empire or kingdom. She 
succeeded to the various thrones of her father on 
his death in 1740, and associated with herself as 
Emperor her husband, Duke Francis of Lorraine, 
who had been her playfellow and whom she had 
married in 1736. In spite of his numerous infi- 
delities, she adored him. Albeit, so far as politics 
were concerned, he was no great help to her; so 
though he bore the title of Emperor, she remained 
unaided at the helm. Hers was no easy task. In 
spite of scraps of paper and guarantees, a coalition 
between Prussia, France, Bavaria, the Palatinate, 
Saxony, Sardinia, Naples and Spain — a pack of 
hungry war-dogs, all tearing at her on every side, 
each howling for his pound of flesh — threatened 
to devour her. She had only England and Hun- 
gary on her side ; but, like Abdul Hamid in our own 
times, she could count upon the quarrel between her 



148 Redesdale's Further Memories 

foes. Prussia was the arch-enemy. Prussia, which 
we are now told, was the original subject of the 
"Hymn of Hate," written, teste the Morning Post, 
by the revolutionary Herweg in 1841, for which 
Herr Lissauer, who substituted England for 
Prussia, has been decorated by a grateful Kaiser.* 
Prussia, of which Heine wrote: "I utterly loathe 
this Prussia, this stiff, hypocritical, sanctimonious 
Prussia, this Tartuffe among the nations." f 

Like our own Queen, Maria Theresia was essen- 
tially a woman of business. She personally directed 
the affairs of her Empire, issuing her commands 
to her ministers, and the little orphan Charlotte, as 
we have seen, for many years acted as her secre- 
tary and reader. The duties were no sinecure, and 
although no doubt the position of a young lady of 
the Court was one of great luxury in some respects 
and greatly coveted, there were also some hardships 
with which those chosen maids had to put up. The 
Empress was large and corpulent; she could not 
bear warmth, and so her ladies had to perform their 
duties in a thorough draught, even when snow was 
being driven in at the windows, falling on to the 
State papers which Charlotte was reading aloud to 
her. 

In spite of her dread of heat, so long as her 
limbs would carry her, the Empress, devout and 
exact in all religious observances, would on Corpus 

* Morning Post, May 8th, 1915. 

t Quoted in the Spectator, May 8th, 1915. 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 149 

Christi day, in the height of summer, piously 
accompany the sacred procession on foot. One 
broiling June day she came back from this cere- 
mony violently heated and tired, having walked half 
across the town under the sun, had to be undressed, 
and have her hair taken down, and sat in a thorough 
draught, eating strawberries and drinking lemon- 
ade, while Charlotte brushed and combed out her 
hair, which was so wet that the poor girl had to 
keep wiping her hands. How Maria Theresia 
would have enjoyed one of Queen Victoria's picnics 
on Lochnagar in a November blizzard! 

One of the difficulties with which those respon- 
sible for the management of the public ceremonials 
in which our Queen took part had to deal, was 
the regulation of the temperature. The enduring 
of heat was to her as to Maria Theresia, a misery 
and an impossibility. She could put up with any 
other discomfort and fatigue; but heat was unbear- 
able. The Emperor Joseph, who did not inherit his 
mother's imperviousness to cold, had to visit her in 
furs. Kaunitz, a privileged minister, was the only 
person who dared to shut the window. "How do 
you manage when you go to Balmoral?" I once 
asked Lord Beaconsfield, who was a chilly mortal. 
"The Queen is very gracious," was the answer, 
"she excuses me from going there." 

In dealing with the aifairs of State both rulers 
showed themselves to be women of strong character 
and indefatigable industry. Their methods, of 



150 Redesdale's Further Memories 

necessity, differed widely. The one, as I have said 
above, was an autocrat; the other, a constitutional 
sovereign, deeply imbued with the sense of her own 
limitations, and yet such a mistress of public busi- 
ness, of constitutional law and of precedent, that 
she often dominated the councils of her ministers, 
many of whom recognized in her their guide and 
instructress in cases of difficulty. Nowhere was 
this more evident than in her treatment of foreign 
affairs. There she was no more a negligible quan- 
tity than Maria Theresia had been; no matter who 
might be Secretary of State, there was always a 
very real power in the background, and that power 
was the Queen. It would be easy to multiply in- 
stances, but we need only point to two cases: the 
Danish Duchies' question in 1864, where, in obedi- 
ence to what she believed to be the wishes of her 
dead husband, she took what is now shown to have 
been an unfortunate line; and, secondly, the dispute 
with the United States on the Trent question in 
1861, where she, with the assistance of the Prince 
Consort, used all her influence to hinder what would 
have been a disastrous war, an unthinkable 
calamity. 

The mention of the Prince Consort brings into 
strong relief two pictures, in which it is difficult 
to say whether we are more startled by the like- 
ness or puzzled by the violence of the contrasts. 
In both cases we see a marriage of true love, in 
each of which a prince of a small reigning family 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 151 

was raised, not for reasons of State, but by pure 
affection, to share the glories of a vast empire and 
a throne before which countless peoples bowed. 
There the likeness between the two husbands comes 
to an end. 

In Prince Albert Queen Victoria found not only 
a faithful and devoted lover, but a helpmate, who 
was ever at her side, and, young as he was, shared 
the heavy burthens which she had to bear, and 
brought to her councils all the store of wisdom and 
statesmanship with which he had been endowed by 
that astute mentor, Baron Stockmar. Not the least 
part of his merit was his self-effacement; yet in 
spite of it he aroused unreasoning jealousies, for 
which his intimacy and the Queen's with the same 
old German physician was in no small measure ac- 
countable. The Emperor Francis, on the contrary, 
was of no assistance to Maria Theresia. Strikingly 
handsome, physically as grand a man perhaps as 
Prince Albert, he had none of the Prince's serious 
qualities. He was essentially and fatally charming, 
but of politics and the affairs of State he took no 
heed; all that he cared for were his flirtations, his 
bric-a-brac, and his collection of coins and medals. 

He was what is called "a dangerous man," and 
when "a dangerous man" is an Emperor to boot 
— Well! But such as he was, his Empress loved 
him with all her soul, content to take upon her own 
shoulders the drudgery of sovereignty, and leaving 
to him its gewgaws and the enjoyment of a brilliant 



152 Redesdale's Further Memories 

idleness. If she ever knew of them she forgave 
him his infidelities, and, like our Queen, worship- 
ping the ground upon which her husband trod, she 
never looked at another man, nor cared for any ad- 
miration but his. As Frau Pichler rather quaintly 
observes, had she done so her maidens must have 
known of it. We are told that no man is a hero to 
his valet. For a woman to be virtuous to her 
Abigail, she must be as chaste as Diana before 
those compromising visits to Endymion, of which 
we may be sure that her nymphs were well aware. 
No breath of scandal ever dimmed the mirror of 
the Empress's fair fame. Queen Victoria herself 
was not more stern in the repression of anything 
approaching loose or unseemly talk. She con- 
sidered it to be the duty of persons in high places 
to repress any lack of decorum, and their privilege 
to set an example to be followed by others. To 
her daughter, the Queen of Naples, she wrote: "It 
is our duty to remember that a word in season or 
a grave look will silence those who indulge in un- 
licensed speech, and have an excellent general 
effect." Nothing better nails to the counter the 
lies of Frederick the Great, so characteristically 
Prussian, than the fact that the capital, which up 
to her time had been notorious for the laxity of 
its morals, was described by Sir John Moore to- 
wards the end of her reign in very laudatory lan- 
guage. "I can imagine," he says, "no city in Europe 
where a young gentleman would see fewer ex- 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 153 

amples, or have fewer opportunities of deep gam- 
ing, open profligacy, or gross debauchery than in 
Vienna." This, as her biographer, Mary Maxwell 
Moffat, says, is a great testimony to the uplifting 
influence of the Empress-Queen. That the influ- 
ence was personal is proved by the relapse of 
Vienna during the nineteenth century. By precept 
and example, she cast out the swine, but when she 
was gone they came back again. 

It was the irony of fate that neither the Em- 
press's virtues, her great beauty, her sweet dispo- 
sition, nor the prestige of her glorious position 
were able to clip the wings of her flighty and too 
attractive husband. That she had some inkling of 
her failure is clear from the advice that she once 
gave to her favourite maiden Charlotte: "Be 
warned and do not marry a man who has nothing 
to do." Queen Victoria was more fortunate. Her 
marriage remained a union of hearts, of which 
time itself had no power to relax the bonds. 

In all that concerns art Queen Victoria was 
essentially a woman of her own time, and it is in 
no sense derogatory to her to say that it was cer- 
tainly not a happy time. In the plastic arts she 
had not the talent of her two brilliant daughters, 
the Empress Frederick and Princess Louise. It is 
true that the sketch-book was the constant com- 
panion of her travels, and illustrated the diary of 
her travels; but her execution did not go much 
beyond the boundaries of the school-girl's album. 



154 Redesdale's Further Memories 

The painters whom she chose to employ as portrait- 
ists — Winterhalter, Landseer, Von Angeli — were 
unluckily chosen. She admired and patronized 
Leighton, but she would not hear of being painted 
by Millais or Watts. Music was her delight, and 
so it was with Maria Theresia ; both ladies loved the 
Italian school, both were themselves gifted with 
lovely voices and had been well trained. Indeed, 
in the Hapsburg family the talent was hereditary; 
all the older members of it were capable musicians, 
and Charles the Sixth would himself accompany 
their chamber music on the harpsichord. 

Mrs. Moffat quotes a letter of Maria Theresia, 
in which she writes: "As for dramatic music, I 
confess that I would rather have the slightest 
Italian thing than all the works of our composers, 
Gaisman, Gluck and others. For instrumental 
music we have a certain Haydn, who has good 
ideas, but he is just beginning to be known." 
Strange words, coming from the Sovereign of the 
capital which was to be the home, above all others, 
of the greatest composers of the world. Mozart she 
knew as a child of six, when he sat upon her lap 
to play, and, tumbling down, was picked up by the 
little Archduchess Marie Antoinette, to whom in 
gratitude he at once proposed marriage ! 

The tender care and loving kindness with which 
Queen Victoria treated all those, from the highest 
to the humblest, who were in any sense dependent 
upon her, is a matter of common knowledge. She 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 155 

shared in their joys, she sympathized with their 
sorrows, interested herself in all the every-day 
changes and chances of their lives. The unclouded 
happiness of her own all too brief married life 
had penetrated her soul with the belief that nothing 
could compare with the bliss of a loving union. 
This she showed even in a case where a young man 
in whom she took a deep interest, and for whom 
she had destined what would have been a very 
advantageous marriage, disappointed her by making 
an unsuitable match. Her answer to one who spoke 
unkindly of this was characteristic and touching. 
"After all," she said, sweetly excusing him, "per- 
haps they loved one another." That in her mind 
was obviously the essential. 

The account of the marriage of the Austrian 
Empress's favourite tirewoman is worth recording, 
not only as showing a parallel to this sweetly indul- 
gent nature of our Queen, but also as giving us a 
curious picture of the formalities of the old Court 
of Vienna. 

Upon her maidens the Empress spent an almost 
motherly care. When not on duty they might go 
out, but must tell Her Majesty whither they were 
bound, and then an Imperial carriage was placed 
at their disposal; when not on duty, they were 
always allowed to receive visitors — even men, but 
their names must be submitted to their mistress, 
and the privileged swains must be of unblemished 
repute. It was in that way, during the Seven 



156 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Years' War, when the detested Prussian Drill- 
Sergeant Frederick was pushing forward and yet 
further forward in Moravia and was besieging 
Olmutz, that Charlotte made the acquaintance of 
Herr von Greiner, at that time a secretary in the 
Bohemian- Austrian Chancellerie. He was accepted 
as a suitor, but must wait till he could offer his 
wife a better position. 

In spite of what her daughter says, Charlotte, 
unless her portraits wickedly malign her, was no 
beauty, and she was tocherless to boot; but she 
was clever and the favourite protegee of the Em- 
press. What could not a capable man of business 
in the public service hope from such an alliance? 
We are told that, doubtless in view of this advan- 
tage, there had been many suitors for her hand, 
but the Empress had always stood in the way. 
Charlotte was in terror lest in this case also she 
should interfere. She was too useful to her mis- 
tress to be lightly spared. There was nothing for 
it but patience. 

Meanwhile, in the year 1765, the Court moved 
to Innsbruck for the marriage of the second prince, 
afterwards the Emperor Leopold II., and there sud- 
denly the Emperor Francis fell a victim to an 
apoplectic stroke. The Empress was stricken dumb 
with grief. She could not weep, but passed the 
night in spasmodic sobbing, till at last in the morn- 
ing the doctors, who were alarmed at her condition, 
bled her, and then the merciful tears came and 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 157 

brought relief. Charlotte was ordered to cut off 
all her mistress's hair, and in her dress, as well as 
in the furniture of her apartments, the widow put 
on the trappings of woe. Of the beauty that largely 
remained to her, since her husband was no longer 
there to see, she took no account. On every 18th 
of August, the day of his death, she remained shut 
up in her room, confessed, fasted, and passed the 
day in sad remembrances, in prayer and in pious 
exercises. If the stones of Windsor Castle could 
prate, they might tell just such a story. 

Now that the lovely fair hair, that crown of 
glory, had been shorn off, and the Empress no 
longer cared for her old elaborate toilette, there 
was less for the favourite tirewoman to do, and 
the wedding with Herr von Greiner was allowed. 
The future bridegroom was presented to the great 
lady, who was surprised to find in him a rather 
commonplace man, and said afterwards to Char- 
lotte : "I thought that you would have chosen some 
gallant gentleman — a Chevalier." However, the 
commonplace man was one in whom she later 
recognized a thoroughly honest and capable official, 
whom she respected and promoted for his worth. 

The year of mourning for the dead Emperor was 
not yet at an end, and the Court had laid aside 
none of the trappings and the suits of woe. But 
Charlotte, as bride that was to be, was allowed 
to dress in colours. The wedding was celebrated 
with all the ceremonies which were at that time pre- 



158 Redesdale's Further Memories 

scribed by Court etiquette. It was still the fashion 
to make a special function of the betrothal, which 
in Charlotte's case was celebrated eight days before 
the marriage. On the wedding day she had to go 
and show herself in her bridal attire to the Em- 
press, who added several presents of jewellery to 
what she was wearing, and lent her a priceless rope 
of pearls from the Imperial Treasury, to be re- 
turned after the ceremony, an ornament which was 
commonly used on such occasions. 

The service was held in the private chapel, and 
the Mistress of the Robes led the bride to the altar. 
When the priest came to the place where the bride 
is told to answer "Yes," she was compelled by 
etiquette to curtesy to the Mistress of the Robes 
and ask her permission to do so. Then the Mistress 
of the Robes stood up, turned herself round to face 
the chapel in which the Empress was, and in her 
turn curtsied, and in dumb show asked Her 
Majesty's consent. This was also given by signs, 
and the Mistress of the Robes, in the same silent 
way, transmitted the pleasure of the Empress, who 
had taken upon herself the duties of mother, upon 
which the bride gratefully curtsied, turned to the 
priest and uttered the fateful "Yes." 

There is something touching in the way in 
which the Empress mothered the orphan whom 
she had almost kidnapped from the Wolfenbuttel 
officers. She surely did not perform her duty by 
halves! When I read the account of the wedding 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 159 

ceremony, my mind went back fifty-two years to 
another wedding, when in St. George's Chapel 
another Queen, recently widowed, sat in a little 
gallery and acknowledged the curtesy of her new 
daughter-in-law, one of the loveliest brides that 
ever sun shone upon. At every step in this sketch 
of the Austrian Empress we are met by something 
that speaks of our own great Queen. 

In this wise was the wedding of one of the Im- 
perial handmaidens celebrated in the days of Maria 
Theresia. Charlotte, now Frau von Greiner, 
entered happily upon her new life. The change 
from the excitement and publicity of the brilliant 
Austrian Court, to the quiet and narrower society 
of the upper middle-class, for whom the Imperial 
surroundings were a thing of awe and mystery, 
must have been very striking. But the bride found 
her account in it, and, as we shall see, Herr von 
Greiner, being a man of quite exceptional talent 
and artistic gifts, was able to attract to his house 
all that was most brilliant among the literary and 
musical celebrities of that time. 

In the year 1769 Caroline — afterwards Frau 
Pichler — was born. In the meantime the Empress 
had by no means relaxed her friendship for her 
mother. The von Grieners were not "hoffahig," 
they could not go to court officially, but Frau von 
Greiner constantly visited her old mistress pri- 
vately, and von Greiner himself had, as I have said, 
won the great lady's favour, and she not only kept 



160 Redesdale's Further Memories 

him in her eye for advancement, but frequently 
sent for him and sought his advice. With a salary 
of four thousand gulden — two hundred pounds, I 
suppose — and a spacious official residence, the fam- 
ily was well able to maintain a good appearance, 
and Herr von Greiner's exceptional attainments 
and artistic gifts as pastelist and poet made the 
house a trysting-place for all that was most notable 
in literature and music — especially music; for at 
Frau von Greiner's weekly assemblies were fre- 
quently seen and heard Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, 
Paesiello and Cimarosa. Painters and sculptors, 
poets and authors less known to fame than those 
great musicians, were welcome visitors, and the 
salon became so popular that even a sprig of no- 
bility — the condescension duly acknowledged — 
might now and then be found there. It is curious 
to see what a hard and fast line Vienna drew (and, 
to a certain extent, still draws) between the upper 
middle-class and the aristocracy — a line as defer- 
entially recognized on the one side as it was 
haughtily imposed on the other. We know how to 
this day, in an Austrian ball-room, "die kleinen 
Komtessen" look with supercilious eyes upon any 
would-be partner who may be introduced to them 
unless his quarterings are fully satisfactory. The 
favour in which Frau von Greiner was held in high 
quarters had no doubt some effect in bridging over 
the gulf which was fixed between the noblesse and 
the bourgeoisie. 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 161 

But I have been straying far away from the 
goal which I set before me. It would be fascinat- 
ing to follow Frau Pichler's story, for it is the story 
of a woman who lived through stirring times, who 
was present during the three attacks upon Vienna, 
who tells us the one story of courteous chivalry of 
the young Napoleon ; who heard Haydn, Weber, Mo- 
zart, Beethoven play their own compositions, and, 
living on till near the middle of the last century, 
could compare their execution with that of Liszt and 
Thalberg. She knew and rather disliked Madame 
de Stael, despising her for tricking out the charms 
of a woman "fair, fat and forty" in a too youthful 
attire; but was charmed by the music of a speak- 
ing voice, her description of which reminds us of 
Sarah Bernhardt. She corresponded at least once 
with Goethe, and was snubbed by the Humboldts, 
which rankled not a little. But all this is beside 
the mark. I am only concerned to show how to the 
end the lives of the two great Queen-Empresses 
followed similar lines. 

Life is like a drawing in black and white, in 
which, of necessity, the black predominates. The 
stronger the drawing, the darker are the shadows ; 
as in an etching by Rembrandt — the more power- 
ful the life, the more violent the contrasts. The 
high lights were high indeed in the early days of 
the two august ladies; the deep gloom of the long 
night of widowhood, which in each case followed 
some twenty years of ideal home sunshine, must 



1 62 Redesdale's Further Memories 

have weighed all the more heavily for the glory 
of the mornings which had ushered in their young 
days ; for true it is that "sorrow's crown of sorrow 
is the remembering happier things !" In facing the 
inevitable, women sometimes show higher courage 
than men. Nothing could be more brave than the 
way in which these two Queens bowed to the decrees 
of fate. The world's work must be done, though 
hearts be broken and the joy of life extinguished. 
They felt that they had duties to their people, and 
they braced themselves to harness. The death of 
the Prince Consort was really a far heavier blow 
to the Queen than that of the Emperor Francis was 
to Maria Theresia — or, rather, perhaps I should 
say a more searching blow, with much further- 
reaching consequences. The Queen lost not only a 
tenderly worshipped husband and lover, but a main- 
stay upon which she leant, an adviser in all matters 
of State, a guiding hand in trouble. Maria The- 
resia lost a husband whom, little as he deserved it, 
she loved with all her soul; a man who was all in 
all to her in her home life, but who in her public life 
was a mere cypher, playing no part in her queen- 
dom. It was, therefore, a braver act of devotion 
for our great lady in that loneliest of all solitudes, 
the solitude of a widowed queen, immediately to 
take up the threads of her complicated statecraft 
without the assistance of her loving helper, than 
it was for the Empress to remain as pilot, bereaved 
indeed, but no more unaided than she had always 



Queen Victoria and Maria Theresia 163 

been. Both laid aside their personal and poignant 
grief to devote themselves to their work. What 
remained to them of life — a cruel length of years : 
in the one case fifteen, in the other forty — was 
given without reserve to the promotion of the wel- 
fare of the fatherland. Duty was to them the 
supreme call, a voice that only became silent in 
death. Both are held in grateful and undying 
memory, but surely no women ever went to their 
rest with cleaner consciences or with better claim 
to be hailed as good and faithful servants. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Wallace Collection 

ONE day, as I was talking to a friend in my 
garden of memory, he, looking round at 
the fine bronzes by which we were sur- 
rounded, remarked what a pity it was that Oriental 
art should be so poorly represented in the Wallace 
Collection; and how much it was to be regretted 
that no specimens of the work of the great Eastern 
metal-workers and famous potters were to be 
found at Hertford House. As a matter of fact, 
cheek by jowl with the glories of the English, 
French, Spanish and Dutch art, there are only 
some half-dozen very poor specimens of Chinese 
cloisonne enamel, practically no pottery, none of 
the grand old Chinese bronzes, and not a single 
example of the work of such masters as the Japan- 
ese Miyochin, Seimin, To-un, and others, men as 
famous in their way as Benvenuto Cellini. It is 
curious that three men so catholic in their tastes 
as the two Lords Hertford and Sir Richard Wal- 
lace should have paid no attention to the art of the 
Far East. 

From the collections we naturally passed to dis- 
cussing the men, and my friend began asking me 

164 



The Wallace Collection 165 

many questions about the great legacy, of which 
I am a trustee, eager to gather something of the 
truth out of the network of fable and falsehood 
by which it is surrounded. Here is what I told 
him. There is, of necessity, some guesswork, but 
guesswork not unsupported by a reasonable foun- 
dation of fact and probability. The strange jumble 
of truth and lies is but one more proof of the 
danger of throwing over all those conventionalities 
which are but so much ballast to keep straight the 
family ship. There are plenty of wreckers in the 
world, and they are never slack in their dirty work ; 
but, above all, they love breaking up the big ships. 
When the 'seventies were still young, I, being at 
the time still in the Diplomatic Service, but "En 
disponibilite," became a director of a foreign rail- 
way company, the business of which often took me 
to Paris, where our head offices were. One day, 
on the return journey to London — in 1872 — I first 
met Sir Richard Wallace on board the steamer from 
Calais. The Duke of Sutherland, with whom I 
was travelling, knew him, and so we became 
acquainted — I little thinking that one day I should 
be brought into very intimate connection with the 
art treasures which he had inherited eighteen 
months earlier. Mr. Scott — afterwards Sir John 
— then a tall, slim, very pleasing youth, was with 
him as his secretary and confidential friend. Sir 
Richard was at that time a strikingly handsome 
man, about fifty-four years of age, with a very 



1 66 Redesdale's Further Memories 

attractive expression, greyish hair, shaved, like his 
patron, Lord Hertford, more or less in the fashion 
set by the Emperor of the French. We had a good 
deal of talk, and, later, I got to know him pretty 
well. When he was Member for Lisburn, he was 
appointed to the Committee of the House of Com- 
mons which sat under Mr. Baillie Cochrane, after- 
wards Lord Lamington, to consider the question of 
new buildings to be erected for the accommodation 
of the various Government departments. He used 
often to come and see me at the Office of Works, 
in order to study the different plans, and very 
warmly took up a scheme which I put forward, 
and which, if it had been adopted, would have saved 
the country a huge sum of money. 

Unfortunately, Sir Stafford Northcote, who was 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, was afraid of sub- 
mitting the first expense to the House of Commons. 
He never realized how complete was the trust 
which the House placed in him, and so my proposals 
fell through, to the great disappointment of Sir 
Richard Wallace, and to the vastly increased cost 
which the country has ultimately had to pay. There 
has seldom been a more flagrant case of penny wis- 
dom and pound folly. The value of the land went 
up by leaps and bounds, and the patient tax-payer 
has suffered, as usual, without a murmur. 

My proposal, briefly stated, was to build a chain 
of Public Offices between Trafalgar Square and 
Parliament Square, purchasing such land as did not 




SIR RICHARD WALLACE, BART. K.C.B. 

From a bust in the Wallace Collection 



The Wallace Collection 167 

already belong to the State. Drummond's Bank 
was then pulled down, and Messrs. George and 
Edgar Drummond, as a favour to myself, very 
patriotically delayed rebuilding for six months, in 
order to give the Government time to consider the 
question. The Public Offices were at that time 
housed in a very haphazard manner, and it was 
evident that some comprehensive scheme must be 
initiated. My plan was generally approved, but it 
was not adopted owing to the costly timidity of 
Ministers. 

Who and what was Sir Richard Wallace ? That 
is a question which excited great interest forty-five 
years ago, an interest which has not altogether died 
out even now. That he was the private secretary 
and dme damnee of Lord Hertford everybody 
knew. 

How he came to occupy that position, and what 
led his patron to alienate from his family in Sir 
Richard's favour so much of his great fortune as 
was in his power, together with the whole of the 
art treasures which he and his father and grand- 
father had collected during three-quarters of a cen- 
tury, at a time when beautiful things were to be 
had for what would now be considered an old song 
— that was a mystery to which no one had a clue, 
and which only now can be solved with absolute 
accuracy. Much that has been suggested is un- 
doubtedly false, based upon conjecture without any 



1 68 Redesdale's Further Memories 

knowledge of such facts as have been brought to 
light. 

Having been a trustee of the so-called Wallace 
Collections since the death of Lady Wallace in 
1897, and having lived in great intimacy with Sir 
John Scott, who was her heir and had been so long 
the fidus Achates of Sir Richard, I have come to 
the conclusion that such evidence as exists and was 
known to Sir John, to Lord Esher and others, en- 
tirely disposes of the scandalous story that he was 
the illegitimate son of Lady Hertford, and there- 
fore half-brother to Lord Hertford. 

The true story, vouched for by people who were 
intimately acquainted with the scandals of the first 
half of the last century, is that Richard Lord Hert- 
ford, when a mere boy, had an intrigue with a 
Scotch girl of low birth — Agnes Wallace, after- 
wards Jackson. The result was Sir Richard Wal- 
lace. As the girl was older than himself, Lord 
Yarmouth, as he then was, had been rather the 
seduced than the seducer, and soon tired of the 
whole connection. He was quite willing to pay, but 
he had no mind to start in life saddled with the 
dead weight of an uneducated mistress and a natu- 
ral son. Lady Hertford, however, got wind of the 
affair through Colonel Curwood, a brother officer 
and intimate friend of Lord Yarmouth. She took 
a fancy to the child, who responded with an affec- 
tion that was almost filial. Lord Hertford, to whom 
his mother's slightest wish was law, took up the 



The Wallace Collection 169 

boy at her bidding, and educated him until he grew 
up and became entirely indispensable. The lad was 
well known in Paris as "Monsieur Richard," Lord 
Hertford's shadow and agent, his representative at 
auctions and sales of works of art. 

The name Richard seems to me to have some 
significance in confirmation of the above story. Is 
it likely that if the child had been Lady Hertford's, 
she should have chosen the name of her eldest legit- 
imate and deeply-loved son, to bestow it upon an 
inconvenient accident? To me it seems utterly in- 
credible. Moreover, would it not have been far 
more likely that she should have tried to smuggle 
away an unnecessary infant of her own than that 
she should have dragged the child into all the pub- 
licity of the home about which there had already 
been too much slanderous gossip? Again, Lady 
Hertford was a woman possessed of great wealth 
in her own right. Why, if Sir Richard was her 
son, did she leave the whole of her fortune to her 
second son, Lord Henry Seymour, and a mere trifle 
to the favourite to whom she was so kind a 
patroness? Obviously she relied upon Lord Hert- 
ford, as his father, to do everything for him. Not 
only the facts, but even the whole probabilities, are 
against the preposterous and malicious story that 
he was her son. 

That the old lady was devotedly attached to Sir 
Richard and made a great pet of him, and that he 
returned her affection with interest, was a matter 



170 Redesdale's Further Memories 

of common knowledge. I have seen many letters 
of hers which attest the fact. When she travelled, 
he made all the arrangements for her, and took 
entire charge of her comfort, his bed being made 
outside her door when they slept at inns in the old 
posting days. He was her devoted slave, her most 
faithful watch-dog. 

Upon his services as secretary, Lord Hertford, 
as I have said, placed entire reliance, but his office 
was not altogether a bed of roses. The great man, 
as a patron, was strict and sometimes severe. Sir 
Richard, with a taste for speculation on the Bourse, 
was sometimes in rather strait circumstances, out 
of which his patron helped him, not without re- 
proof, to the tune of a good many thousand pounds. 
I have seen a document showing that Lord Hert- 
ford in 1854 paid twenty thousand pounds on this 
account through Messrs. Rothschild. There is in 
the Wallace Collection a certain engraved crystal 
tazza of Italian workmanship, a very lovely little 
gem. Sir Richard, in his poor days, picked it up 
for a few francs in an old sort of rag-and-bone 
shop in a street in the neighbourhood of the Temple. 
Some time afterwards, being rather hard up, he 
took it to Lord Hertford and asked him to buy it. 
"No," was the answer, "I won't have it. I will not 
encourage your extravagance ; you must learn to be 
more economical." 

Sir Richard sold the tazza to a dealer for two 
hundred and fifty francs, and a year or two later 




RICHARD MARQUIS OF HERTFORD, K.G. 
From a bust in the Wallace Collection 



The Wallace Collection 171 

had the luck to buy it back, but he had to pay ten 
times the price and more. Often he had hard times 
enough, as he himself said when he told the story, 
but when Lord Hertford died in 1870 his day had 
come. The fortune which he inherited was in those 
days considered colossal. It would look less now 
compared with the huge riches of American pluto- 
crats, but in 1870 these were yet in the making. 
Two very rich marriages, the second and third 
marquesses having both married heiresses, had, in 
addition to great landed estates, placed the Hert- 
fords in an altogether exceptional position. 

The way in which the third and fourth lords 
elected to spend their wealth had woven round them 
a whole tissue of legends, chiefly founded upon 
mere gossip. Virtuous and highly-respectable 
London delighted in crowning them with a halo 
of ill-fame, and when Lord Yarmouth, afterwards 
fourth Marquess, bought Bagatelle, it was declared 
to be the scene of orgies compared with which the 
mysteries of the Bona Dea were as innocent as 
nursery teas. Many of the stories were started by 
the rather second-class, or even demirep, English 
Society which was gathered together at Paris, 
jealous at being kept out from the intimacy of a 
very exclusive man. 

These stories when repeated, we may be sure, 
lost nothing in the telling, and so Bagatelle came 
to be looked upon as a sort of Pare aux Cerfs, 
while Bishop Luscombe's congregation stalked with 



172 Redesdale's Further Memories 

virtuously uplifted noses along the Rue d'Agues- 
seau, thanking Heaven that they were not as Lord 
Hertford. Such a reputation, even if it were a 
mere scandalous libel, was hardly such as would 
commend itself to General Sir Francis Seymour, 
the proud patrician who was to succeed to the title 
as fifth Marquess. Indeed, it must have been gall 
and wormwood to a man trained as he had been 
for many years in the solemn dignity of the staid 
Victorian Court. There could be no sympathy, still 
less affection, between the cousins. But there was 
more than all this to influence Lord Hertford when 
he made his will, which left his successor practically 
nothing but the broad acres of Warwickshire, with 
a great costly palace to keep up, at a moment when 
land was falling in value every day and agriculture 
was drifting no man could tell whither. 

Whatever shape Richard Lord Hertford's eccen- 
tricities may have taken, he had one redeeming 
virtue. He was a model son, and his love for his 
mother was the great passion of his life. To attack 
her, to be in any way wanting in respect for her, 
was in his eyes the one crime for which there was 
no forgiveness, and that was precisely the crime 
of which Sir Francis Seymour was guilty. It was 
a pity, to say the least of it, that the unkind things 
sure to be repeated, of which he was so prodigal 
in speaking of Lady Hertford, should ever have 
been uttered. However much he might disapprove 
of Lord Hertford's way of life, it would have been 



The Wallace Collection 173 

wise to remember that a man is not responsible for 
his grandmother's indiscretions, and the shady pa- 
rentage of Maria Fagnani might well have been 
allowed the benefit of silence. At any rate, it was 
not the business of Sir Francis to trumpet that or 
any other scandal about her. 

Her story was curious. All the actors in the 
play have long been dead, but it is so intimately 
connected with the history of the Wallace Collec- 
tion that, while there is no one left to whom its 
relation could give pain, it still retains a special 
interest. Anything that can throw light upon the 
passing of all those treasures into the possession of 
the nation is worth recording; and it is, moreover, 
an act of justice to clear the memory of a lady who 
has been somewhat roughly — and, as I believe, 
without foundation, handled in the "Dictionary of 
National Biography." 

Under the blessing of the law, Maria was the 
daughter of the Marchese and Marchesa Fagnani, 
and the adopted child of George Selwyn. But the 
Marchesa, who was said to have been a ballet- 
dancer, must have been none too faithful to her 
husband; for, as a matter of fact, George Selwyn 
was said to dispute with the Duke of Queensberry, 
the wicked "old Q," the honour of being her father. 
As to that there seems to be no certain evidence, 
but one would have thought that such a rivalry, or 
partnership — whichever it might be — would have 
bred a jealousy between the two men. Not a bit 



174 Redesdale's Further Memories 

of it ! They remained fast friends, were constantly 
together, and, when apart, wrote to one another in 
the most affectionate terms. 

At George Selwyn's death in 1791 he left thirty- 
three thousand pounds to Maria and the rest of his 
fortune to "old Q." When the Duke, in his turn, 
came to an end of his stormy life, dying in the 
odour of iniquity in 1810, he bequeathed to Maria, 
who had married Lord Yarmouth in 1798, a for- 
tune of between three and four hundred thousand 
pounds, together with the famous house opposite 
the Green Park in Piccadilly, in the window of 
which, when he was too old to walk, he used to sit 
ogling the pretty women as they passed below him. 
That window, with its leering old tenant, was one 
of the sights of London. 

The Marchese Fagnani (Fagniani is a mis- 
spelling in all the English books) belonged to an 
old Milanese family. In the sixteenth century there 
was a poet of the name who gained some literary 
fame; others of the family were well-known law- 
yers, archaeologists, mathematicians and church- 
men in the seventeenth century — all men of good 
repute ; and as Maria was undoubtedly born in holy 
wedlock, the mesalliance was not so very great. 

In spite of this there must have been some doubt 
as to the desirability of alliance with the Fagnanis, 
for the marriage with Lord Yarmouth was a hole- 
and-corner affair, hustled through at Southampton 
on the 1 8th of May, 1798. Southampton was then 



The Wallace Collection 175 

quite a small country town, very different from 
what it is now, just the sort of place where a mar- 
riage could be celebrated without fuss and in some 
secrecy. Indeed, when I remember it fifty years 
later it was still in its infancy and very primitive, 
with at least one delightful old house standing in 
its own grounds in the High Street above Bar. 
Altogether it was not the sort of wedding that 
certainly would have been arranged for the heir 
of the proud and royal Seymours had the magnates 
of the family not disapproved of the match. The 
French writers in newspapers, who made great 
capital out of the whole romance at the time of 
Lord Hertford's death in 1870, went out of their 
way to associate the Prince Regent with the Fag- 
nani mystery. They hinted that the prince also 
claimed the paternity of Maria, and that he even 
attended the marriage. But that is an utter ab- 
surdity, for which there was no foundation. Imme- 
diately after the marriage Lord and Lady Yar- 
mouth made their home in Piccadilly, next door to 
"Old Q," who did not die till twelve years later. 

It is pretty clear that the marriage with Maria 
did not lower Lord Yarmouth's social position, 
otherwise Lord Castlereagh would hardly have 
chosen him as his second in his famous duel with 
Mr. Canning, for whom Mr. Charles Ellis, after- 
wards Lord Seaford, acted. Both men missed their 
first shots; in the second shot Mr. Canning was 
grazed in the leg. A duel between the Minister of 



176 Redesdale's Further Memories 

War and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 
was a matter of too great importance to be en- 
trusted to a gentleman who was under a cloud. 
After Lord Yarmouth succeeded to the Marquisate 
in 1822, he received the Garter himself, and was 
sent by George the Fourth as special ambassador to 
carry the same order to the Emperor Nicholas in 
1827. 

At the time of her marriage the bride was no 
longer in her first youth; she was at least twenty- 
seven years old. For the correspondence between 
George Selwyn and the Duke of Queensberry shows 
that in 1772 she was already teething, and under 
the care of the former at Paris as his adopted 
child; and he was fretting himself into bad health 
lest the mother should take the little creature — 
Mie Mie, as she was called — away from him. The 
Duke, then Lord March, while abounding in good 
advice to his friend, promised his good offices, say- 
ing at the time that the Marchesa was sure to act 
in opposition to his (the Duke's) wishes and advice. 
The child was taken away by her mother for a time, 
but ultimately and permanently given back to her 
adoring guardian or father. From that time forth 
the noble Italian lady seems to have troubled herself 
about her baby no more. 

As I have already said, there is no certainty as 
to Maria's parentage; indeed, the published letters 
leave the whole story in a state of confusion which 



The Wallace Collection 177 

is perfect. Robinson, in his Life of "Old Q" (page 
143), says: 

"Jesse, who was privileged to go over Selwyn's 
correspondence, though refusing as a false affecta- 
tion of delicacy to pass over in complete silence the 
mysterious reports respecting the true parentage 
of Selwyn's infantile charge, asserts that although 
references occur in the most private papers of 
Selwyn which unquestionably led to the supposition 
that either Lord March (Old Q) or Selwyn was, 
or, rather, that each severally believed himself to 
be, the father of the child, yet no certain proofs 
exist. Further, a letter addressed by Madame Fag- 
nani to Selwyn, July 31st, 1772 (of which Jesse 
gives a translation), does not express any but the 
most polite feelings of friendship for the guardian 
of her child. Lest I may be misrepresented in allud- 
ing to a matter that a faithful record of established 
facts incident to my subject warrants, Madame 
Fagnani's letter is inserted in justice to all 
concerned : 

" 'My very dear and respectable Friend, 

" 1 cannot find terms sufficiently expressive 
to thank you for all your kindness, and more par- 
ticularly for the pains you take in regard to my 
daughter. I can assure you that nothing is more 
sensibly felt by me than the proofs of friendship 
which I have received from you on this occasion. 
The more I know the world, the more I perceive 



178 Redesdale's Further Memories 

the difficulty of finding a person who resembles 
you, and I consider myself the happiest of mortals 
solely from the happiness I have had in forming 
your acquaintance and obtaining your friendship. 

" 'I am enchanted in learning that my daughter 
is in good health, though I fear she will suffer much 
in cutting her teeth. I venture to beg of you to 
continue to give me tidings of her, as without your 
kindness in writing to me from time to time, I 
should have been ignorant for the last three months 
of the fate of ma petite. My lord,* on his part, 
is a little indolent, but I forgive him this little fault 
on account of the many good qualities of his heart 
which he has to counterbalance it. 

" 'I hope that your health is good. Pray present 
my compliments to Lord March, and tell him that 
I expect to hear from him. Preserve your friend- 
ship for me, and do not forget the most grateful 
and affectionate of all your friends, who makes it 
her duty and pleasure to be, 

" 'Your very sincere servant and friend, 

" 'COSTANZA FAGNANl/ " 

Surely that is a letter which must have been 
written without any idea that it would ever be pub- 
lished, and it certainly gives no sunlight to clear 
away the clouds of the story. To add to the mys- 
tery of Maria's parentage, Roscoe, in his book on 
Selwyn, publishes two letters, one from Dr. War- 
lord March, afterwards "Old Q." 



The Wallace Collection 179 

ner, the witty Chaplain to the British Embassy in 
Paris in 1780, when she was nine years old, in 
which, writing to Selwyn, he makes no disguise of 
his belief in the paternity of the Duke. The letter 
is also interesting as giving some slight idea of the 
impression which the child created : 

"That freshness of complexion I should have 
great pleasure in beholding. It must add to her 
charms, and cannot diminish the character, sense 
and shrewdness which distinguish her physiognomy, 
and which she possesses in a great degree, with a 
happy engrafting of a high-bred foreign air upon 
an English stock. But how very pleasant to me 
was your honest and naive confession of the joy 
your heart felt at hearing her admired. It is, 
indeed, most extraordinary that a certain person 
who has great taste (would he had as much 
nature)* should not see her with very different 
eyes from what he does. I can never forget that 
naive expression of Madame de Sevigne : 'Je ne sais 
comment Ton fait de ne pas aimer sa fille.' " 

The other letter to which I allude is one from 
George Selwyn to Lord Carlisle, written at a time 
when complaining that he was "le jouet des autres," 
and was being annoyed beyond all bearing by the 
way in which Madame Fagnani behaved to him 
about Maria, threatening to take her away from 
him altogether. In that letter he writes: "Helas! 

* The Duke of Queensberry. 



180 Redesdale's Further Memories 

rende mi figlia mis!" That may have meant no 
more than that the child was very dear to him, and 
need not necessarily imply that he believed himself 
to be her father. That he did so believe, however, 
is pretty certain. He educated her, placed her at 
school with Mrs. Terry at Campden House in Ken- 
sington, then a beautiful old house almost in the 
country, and having finally succeeded in getting rid 
of the mother's importunities, kept her with him 
until his death in 1791, introducing her into the 
best society. Gainsborough painted her portrait, 
as did Sir Joshua Reynolds, but the pictures no 
longer exist, or, at any rate, are lost. 

Of the legal father, the Marquis Fagnani, we 
hear very little. The only notice I have found of 
him is in a letter from Selwyn to Lord Carlisle, 
dated June 19th, 1781: 

"Belgiojoso told me last night that he had had 
letters from Milan, by which he was informed that 
the M. [Marquis] Fagnani was gone quite mad. 
He has been stone blind for a considerable time, 
and I take it for granted that both these misfor- 
tunes are come from the same cause — that is, mer- 
cury. His experiments to ease the one probably 
occasioned the other. I never hear one syllable 
from any of the family. I hope in God that I never 
shall, nor poor Mie Mie either. It grows every day 
less likely, and yet when I am out of spirits, that 
dragon, among others, comes across me and dis- 



The Wallace Collection 181 

tresses me, and the thought of what must happen 
to that child if I am not alive to protect her." 

George Selwyn was no further molested in the 
possession of the child. He lived for ten years 
after that letter was written, and by that time Maria 
had grown to woman's estate. She was twenty 
years of age, and had, under George Selwyn's will, 
a snug little fortune of her own, besides expecta- 
tions, amply to be realized, of further benefits from 
the Duke of Queensberry. He doubtless took pa- 
ternal care of the young lady who was to inherit all 
that he could alienate from the Douglas family. 
She became one of the greatest heiresses, if not the 
greatest, of her day. 

In her youth Maria Fagnani must have been a 
very fascinating girl. To George Selwyn, as we 
have seen, she was as the apple of his eye. He 
simply adored her. If she had a cold in the head, 
or an infantile ailment, however trivial, it was tor- 
ture to him, provoking sympathy from his cor- 
respondents, who themselves seemed to be quite 
under the spell of the delightful child; and as he 
apparently never destroyed a note, there are plenty 
of these condolences in the budget of letters pub- 
lished by Jesse. To have won the heart of Thacke- 
ray's Marquess of Steyne, if that fastidious per- 
sonage ever possessed such an organ, was another 
feather in her cap, and in her old age we know how 



1 82 Redesdale's Further Memories 

tenderly her son and Richard Wallace both loved 
her. 

In 1803 Lord and Lady Yarmouth were detained 
in France — he interned at Verdun — when war was 
again declared after the rupture of the Peace of 
Amiens, and their second son, Lord Henry Sey- 
mour, was born in Paris in 1805. Scandal declared 
that he was the son of Junot, Due d'Abrantes, with 
whom Lady Yarmouth was very intimate. There 
is a note in Roscoe, page 8, which says : "She led a 
life of pleasure (1802-1807), travelling on the 
Continent with the Marshal Andoche." That was 
Junot's Christian name — but that he never was a 
marshal was his great grievance against Napoleon. 

This Lord Henry is not to be confounded, as is 
commonly done, with the Lord Henry Seymour, 
son of the first Marquess, who lived at Norris 
Castle, near Cowes, and spent a fortune in building 
the famous sea-wall. The Lord Henry with whom 
we have to deal was a very eccentric personage. 
Unlike his brother, Richard Lord Hertford, who 
was a handsome man, and in his youth a dandy 
of the 10th Hussars, Lord Henry was singularly 
ugly, even grotesque. There was in the Rue Lafitte 
a sketch or caricature of him, which I have seen, 
in which he was represented as a sort of Quilp, 
stunted, misshapen, and of prodigious strength. He 
was a hero of the various Salles d'Armes, a famous 
fencer and athlete, and the founder, or, at any rate, 
one of the founders, of the French Jockey Club. 



The Wallace Collection 183 

A kindly man withal, for by his will, in which his 
horses appeared as legatees — never to be crossed 
again — he left the bulk of his fortune to the hos- 
pitals of Paris. He died in 1859, three years after 
the loss of his mother. It used to be said that he 
never even set foot in England, but that was prob- 
ably only one of the many fables set afloat about 
the two brothers. So curious a quartet as the 
mother, the two sons, and the enigma that was M. 
Richard, afterwards Sir Richard Wallace, fur- 
nished fine food for eavesdroppers and gossip- 
mongers. 

For twenty-eight years after the death of his 
father in 1842, Richard Lord Hertford lived prac- 
tically altogether in Paris, passing his time between 
the Rue Lafitte and Bagatelle, the little toy house 
on the outskirts of the Bois de Boulogne, which in 
1780 was built by Bellanger in a few weeks at the 
order of the Comte d'Artois (Charles the Tenth), 
for a bet, in order to entertain Queen Marie An- 
toinette on a fixed day. The repetition in one of the 
rooms of the decoration of peacocks with spread 
tails in the boudoir of the Queen at Versailles was 
probably a delicate compliment — a little surprise — 
addressed to her on her visit. When I first saw it 
some fifteen years ago, although the house was 
empty and the famous statues had been removed 
and sold, it was still instinct with a certain eight- 
eenth-century charm. The daintily laid-out 
grounds were still beautifully kept, and I should 



184 Redesdale's Further Memories 

hardly have been surprised had I suddenly come 
upon one of Fragonard's idylls, with shepherdesses 
powdered and hooped, and gentle shepherds to 
match, appropriately dressed in spotless pink and 
blue silk. 

In that house, as in those idylls, there are tears 
when we remember how soon so many of those 
pretty, frivolous, powdered heads were to fall into 
the basket of Monsieur de Paris. Although the 
famous "Nelly O'Brien" of Sir Joshua, and perhaps 
Romney's "Perdita," were bought by the second 
Marquess, the foundation of the collection of art 
treasures which, since the militant ladies three or 
four years ago took to fighting pictures in the Na- 
tional Gallery have been stored away in the cellars 
of Hertford House, was laid by Francis, third Lord 
Hertford, who bought the glorious "Perseus and 
Andromeda" by Titian, which the keen eyes of Sir 
Claude Phillips rescued from a bath-room, where 
it had been stored away and forgotten, a number 
of the Dutch pictures and two of the Vandycks. 
But by far the greater part of it was acquired by 
his son Richard, the fourth Marquess. 

Very important additions, especially in the 
armoury, were made by Sir Richard Wallace, who 
was himself a born collector, and had acquired no 
little experience, both on his own account, and as 
Lord Hertford's representative at the great auction 
sales of Paris. His taste in Oriental art was dis- 
tinctly bad. He bought a few very inferior speci- 



The Wallace Collection 185 

mens of Chinese cloisonne enamel, and two por- 
celain bowls of the Chia Ching reign, 1 796-1 821, 
a period when the art of China reached almost its 
lowest level, with very inferior mounts by some 
English bungler. Of these he was inordinately 
proud. There are two or three very fine celadon 
vases, with exquisitely chiselled French mounts, in 
one of the glass cases, but there is no evidence as to 
who bought them. 

The reason of the fourth Lord Hertford's self- 
condemned exile in Paris, when he owned five pala- 
tial houses in London, besides Ragley, Sudbourne 
and other places, is not easy to ascertain. There 
was a story, firmly believed in my youth, and con- 
firmed by Sir Richard Wallace to Sir John Scott, 
that his father tried to force him into a cruel mar- 
riage with the daughter of one of his mistresses, 
with whom he conspired to make it appear that 
Lord Yarmouth, as he then was, had compromised 
the girl. The young man deeply resented this out- 
rage, and took refuge in Paris, where his mother 
was living. Certainly he had established himself 
there during his father's lifetime, for it was as Lord 
Yarmouth that he bought Bagatelle in 1830, and he 
did not succeed to the marquisate until twelve years 
later. 

Yriarte's story that he left London on account of 
a quarrel with the parish over the rates of his house 
in Piccadilly, is hardly to be accepted. It is far 
more likely that he left England in order to free 



1 86 Redesdale's Further Memories 

himself from his father, for whom he had no love 
or respect, and made Paris his home that he might 
be with his mother, whom he adored. She, with 
Lord Henry Seymour and Monsieur Richard, lived 
at No. i, Rue Faitbout, Lord Hertford's headquar- 
ters being hard by at No. 2, Rue Lafitte. There 
he lived the life of an invalid and sybarite, hardly 
to be called happy in spite of his great possessions — 
a recluse, the darkness of whose hypochondria was 
only cheered by his correspondence with Mr. S. 
Mawson, who was his agent in London for the pur- 
chase, restoration and care of pictures, or by some 
brilliant triumph at Christie's or in the Paris auc- 
tion-rooms. 

Few people saw him, and still fewer knew him. 
And yet he had all the qualifications which would 
have enabled him to shine among his fellows. 
Yriarte said of him : "Causeur celebre, tres spirituel, 
tres lettre, d'une politesse accomplie, d'un raffine- 
ment rare, ses gouts personnels l'eloignaient cepen- 
dant de la societe, et il a vecu toute sa vie dans 
un milieu inferieur. II y apportait meme avec ses 
intimes une maniere d'etre dissimulee, peu con- 
forme avec le cant anglais, et il affichait une sorte 
de cynisme que les deux on trois amis intimes qu'il 
a conserves jusqu'a sa mort regardaient comme son 
masque d'emprunt." His wit, if sometimes a little 
cynical, or even a little risky, was undeniable, and 
what are called "good stories" of him were the joy 
of clubs. 



The Wallace Collection 187 

That he suffered acutely there can be no doubt, 
for Sir Richard Wallace once told me that he went 
with him to Contrexeville — we know what that 
means — which fifty years ago was a very different 
place from what it is now, and where all the sordid 
features of life at that time must have been torture 
to a man of his exquisite refinement. With public 
life he had no concern. As a young man he was 
for a few years in the House of Commons, and on 
succeeding to the title, he delivered a maiden speech 
in the House of Lords, and that was all. His one 
and only participation in affairs was in 1855, when 
he consented to act as one of the jury at the Exhi- 
bition of Paris. 

Upon this subject he wrote a characteristic letter 
to Mawson: 

"Only think of my being at the Champs-Elysees 
every morning at nine o'clock. Hard work for an 
old fellow who has very different habits. I am 
obliged to get up every morning between six and 
seven o'clock to be at the exhibition in proper time 
to preside over a group composed of four classes. 
I remain there almost all day doing my work, and 
as I am not accustomed to this sudden activity, I 
am very tired, and, in consequence, neglect my own 
affairs." 

It was, of course, his intimacy with Louis Na- 
poleon which caused him to accept such a violent 
break in his habits, but he owed the Emperor some 



188 Redesdale's Further Memories 

gratitude, for it was by his friendly help that he 
was enabled to add to the grounds of Bagatelle, and 
again to employ Dasson to copy the famous bureau 
in the Louvre. Apropos to Bagatelle, Mr. MacColl, 
in his introduction to the catalogue of pictures at 
Hertford House, to which I owe great obligation, 
has a good story. It is said "that two acquaintances 
asked leave to fight a duel in the grounds. The 
Marquess politely replied that he had not the slight- 
est objection to their shooting one another, but 
could not trust their skill so far as to risk his 
statues." Perhaps most people would have en- 
dorsed his view of the comparative value of mas- 
terpieces by Pigalle, Lemoyne and Houdon, and the 
lives or limbs of the would-be Bobadils. Hardly 
could they be worth Houdon's famous "Baigneuse." 

Lord Hertford's letters to Mawson, which were 
sold to the trustees by Mr. Mawson's daughter, 
show how keenly he watched the great sales both 
in London and Paris. The English sales he, of 
course, very rarely attended, and when he did so, 
it was Mawson who did the bidding, guided by 
a code of signals given by motions of Lord 
Hertford's hat. Nor was he personally more active 
if he was present at a French sale ; he seems to have- 
carried his dislike of all publicity into every phase 
of life, and to have conducted all his business by 
agents. 

The correspondence with Mawson, of which 
many extracts are given by Mr. MacColl in his 



The Wallace Collection 189 

catalogue of the pictures is interesting, not only as 
showing Lord Hertford's great personal interest in 
art and the extraordinary difference in prices be- 
tween now and then, but also as revealing at least 
one charming side in a character which, owing to 
its eccentricity, was, I honestly believe, cruelly 
maligned. No mere selfish voluptuary, such as Lord 
Hertford was described by the evil tongues of those 
who did not know him, could have inspired the 
affection which was felt for him by those who did. 
Sir Richard Wallace more than once spoke to me 
of him in terms of the strongest respect and affec- 
tion, and, on the other hand, his gratitude to Sir 
Richard is expressed with pathetic feeling in his 
codicil to his will of June 7th, 1850: "To reward 
as much as I can Richard Wallace for all his care 
and attention to my dear mother, and likewise for 
his devotedness to me during a long and painful 
illness I had in Paris in 1840, and on all other occa- 
sions, I give such residue to the said Richard Wal- 
lace now living at the Hotel des Bains, Boulogne- 
sur-Mer, in France, and whose domicile previous 
to the Revolution of 1848 was in my mother's 
house, Rue Taitbout No. 3, formerly No. 1, abso- 
lutely." 

The man who wrote those words had a heart. 
The letters to Mawson are often worded as if he — 
Mawson — were conferring the most signal favours 
upon his employer. The most formal commissions 
of the earlier days of their connection soon grew 



190 Redesdale's Further Memories 

to be letters of absolute affectionate gratitude. 
Lord Hertford had the most complete confidence 
in the judgment, taste and good faith of his agent. 
Well might he trust him, for Aladdin was not more 
faithfully served by the slaves of the ring and the 
lamp. But it is only a kindly nature and sweet 
disposition which is capable of dealing with a sub- 
ordinate without the slightest tinge of patronizing 
condescension. Two or three examples will suffice 
to show the nature of the intimacy between the 
employer and the employed. 

The Duke of Buckingham's sale at Stowe, in 
1848, created an immense sensation. I remember 
it well, for although I was only eleven years old, 
I used to hear much art talk even in those days 
between my father and his friends. It is the sub- 
ject of a characteristic letter from Lord Hertford 
to Mawson, quoted by Mr. MacColl, dated Sep- 
tember 10th, 1848; it was written from Boulogne: 

"I intended being at Stowe on the fifteenth, but 
I find that it is not certain whether I shall be able 
to attend the sale on that day. I think we must 
have the 'Unmerciful Servant/ by Rembrandt, and 
hope the price will not be as unmerciful as the 
subject; but you know that I place all confidence 
in you, and depend upon your kindness on this 
occasion. 

"The Rembrandt and the Domenichino are my 
favourites, and I depend upon you for doing the 



The Wallace Collection 191 

best. Pray have the kindness not to mention to 
anybody that you buy on my account. I am very 
anxious my name should not appear. In the event 
of my being in time for the sale, you would see me 
there, and my hat would play the same part it has 
already acted in similar circumstances." 

On September 24th, Lord Hertford wrote to 
thank Mr. Mawson for the transaction, adding: 

"I hope and trust we have not paid our pictures 
much too dear. I am very glad you like them, as 
I have a very high opinion of your judgment." 

The great Rembrandt was bought for two thou- 
sand three hundred pounds. What would it fetch 
to-day? 

In July, 1855, the contents of St. Dunstan's, in 
the Regent's Park, were sold, and were the subject 
of the enclosed letters: 

"Rue Lafitte, Paris. 

"July 5th, 1855. 
"There are a few things I should like to have at 
the sale of my father's villa in the Regent's Park 
on the 9th inst." 

"Paris, July 6th, 1855. 
"In anticipation that you will have the kindness 
to attend the sale at the Regent's Park for me, and 
having no time to spare, I send you the list of things 



192 Redesdale's Further Memories 

I wish to have, and that I hope you will have the 
kindness to buy for me : 

"Pictures. 
"118. P. Veronese — Not more than £40 or £50. 
"120. Ruysdael — What you think it is worth and 

a little more. 
"122. Northcote — 'Portrait of George IV. when 

Prince of Wales/ I am anxious to 

have it." 

"Paris, July 20th, 1855. 
"I am extremely obliged to you for having had 
the kindness to buy my 'caprices' at the Regent's 
Park sale. You did it all beautifully and just what 
I wished. I depend on your usual kindness for 
having the 'Prince of Wales' ' portrait repaired for 
me. I rather regret the landscape (i.e., the Ruys- 
dael), though an indifferent picture, because it 
was in my room when I was a boy a few years 
ago. What prices people give now for all these 
old affairs ! It is ridiculous !" 

Only once does Lord Hertford sound a note of 
disquiet at the price paid by his commissioner, and 
that was for the famous portrait by Velasquez of 
"Don Baltasar Carlos in Infancy," which fetched 
£1,680 at the Louis Philippe sale at Christie's in 
May, 1853. He writes: 

"As for the Velasquez, I do not remember it at 
all, ainsi je ne puis rien dire. What frightens me 



The Wallace Collection 193 

is that it appears never to have struck me at the 
Louvre, as I do not remember it at all. You gave 
a prodigious price for it, but as I have great confi- 
dence in your taste and judgment, as well as in 
everything else, I dare say I shall like it, and I long 
to have a look at it, which I hope soon to be able 
to do." 

It was certainly not a bad investment at the pro- 
digious price. 

Other letters are full of the most flattering 
expressions : 

"April nth, 1856. 
"I have only a moment to thank you a thousand 
times for your great kindness in giving me some 
details of the Sibthorpe sale." 

"April 23rd, 1856. 
"A thousand thanks for your kindness." 

But these expressions are too numerous to quote ; 
still, I will give one more because it really testifies 
to something like friendship. 

Writing from Paris, December nth, 1863, Lord 
Hertford says : 

"I was in hopes that I should have had the pleas- 
ure of seeing you in Brussels something like a couple 
of months ago. There was a goodish portrait by 
Rubens that I bought. I shall be delighted to show 
it you some day, and I hope you will like it." 



194 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Certainly Lord Hertford was a great gentleman, 
one whom it must have been a pleasure to serve. 

It is easy to imagine the saeva indignatio of Lord 
Hertford if he could come to life again and see 
"the prices which people give now for these old 
affairs." Money could hardly have been better in- 
vested than it was by himself, his father and his 
grandfather, when they paid what were deemed 
wild sums for their works of art. Fancy Sir 
Joshua's "Nellie O'Brien" being bought by the sec- 
ond Marquess for £64 is. at the Caleb Whitefoord 
sale. Think of the third Marquess buying Van- 
dyck's "Young Italian Nobleman," a glorious por- 
trait of the Genoese period, for £409 10s. In the 
second half of the nineteenth century prices went 
up madly, but, even so, Lord Hertford, when he 
gave £1,795 IOS - f° r "Mrs. Carnac," was purchas- 
ing gold for silver. Why, the first state of the 
mezzotint engraving of that picture by J. R. Smith 
was sold a few years ago, if I remember aright, 
for eleven hundred guineas. For the "Strawberry 
Girl" the price paid at the Rogers sale was £2,205. 
"No man," said Sir Joshua, "could ever produce 
more than half a dozen original works, and that is 
one of mine." 

Lord Hertford was delighted with the acquisi- 
tion. He wrote to Mawson : 

"You have done admirably, and I return you most 
sincere thanks for your kindness. The 'Straw- 



The Wallace Collection 195 

berry* is dear. I should be sorry to have a large 
basket at that price; but it seems it is beautiful, 
and in this affair, as in others, I have completely 
followed your good advice, and you have added to 
my collection pictures I have never seen, which 
shows, more than words can express, the great and 
friendly confidence I have in you. I am sure I 
shall be delighted with what you have acquired. I 
am very sorry your honourable name was not 
coupled with our 'Girl' when she was knocked down. 
It is not fair that you should not enjoy the little 
glory of having secured in a gallant manner the 
gem of this interesting sale, so you are at full 
liberty to use my name with yours respecting this 
painting. Was it not an immense price? I don't 
regret it at all; on the contrary, I am delighted to 
have so fine a Sir Joshua, as I am extremely fond 
of them, and they cannot always be had when 
wanted." 

Another notable picture bought at the Rogers 
sale was the "Don Baltasar Carlos in the Riding 
School," by Velasquez, for which Mawson paid 
£1,210 is. A wonderful bargain at the Stowe sale 
was Murillo's "Assumption of the Virgin," knocked 
down for £58 16s. 

I have no space to go into details, but we can form 
some idea of the value of these purchases when 
we see that Lord Hertford bought five of the very 
finest Sir Joshua's for £7,974 5s. The six finest 



196 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Rembrandt's cost him £5,453 15s.; five of the best 
Watteaus, £2,037. What superb investments — to 
speak of no others! 

It is something of an anti-climax to find Lord 
Hertford giving £4,000, and Sir Richard Wallace 
£2,400, for works by Ary Scheffer. Well might 
Lord Hertford write to Mawson in 1853: "You 
know, fancy has a great deal to do with pictures as 
with everything else." £1,680 — a prodigious price" 
for a Velasquez ! £4,000 — given without hesitation 
for a picture by that most namby-pamby of artists, 
Ary Scheffer! 

The desire to surround himself with beautiful 
works of art was one of the crimes laid to the 
charge of Lord Hertford. He was extravagant, 
he was selfish. As to the first of these accusations, 
the prices which he paid were surely no more than 
what was permissible to a man with an income of 
nearly a quarter of a million sterling; and, as I 
have shown, from the mere investor's point of view 
the money was well laid out. As for the cry of 
selfishness, what could be more natural than that 
a man endowed with the most refined taste and 
judgment, debarred by health no less than by in- 
clination, from the more active relaxations in which 
rich men find pleasure — the turf, sport of all kinds, 
hunting, and, of late years certainly, shooting, 
should be captivated by the excitement of the auc- 
tion-rooms. It was in them that he found the 
pleasures of the chase. He was deprived of much, 



The Wallace Collection 197 

and it were scurvy treatment to reproach him for 
what harmed no living being at the time, but has 
ended by giving joy to millions of his countrymen. 
The amusement with which he solaced long days 
and years of physical pain, aching under a com- 
plaint which notoriously affects the spirits perhaps 
more than any other, has borne fruit for which we 
should be grateful, even though it be only indirectly 
that we owe it to him. He might fairly have written 
in his will like Bacon : "For my name and memory, 
I leave it to men's charitable speeches and to foreign 
nations, and to the next age." We are "the next 
age" ; it behoves us to be not only just but generous. 
To our shame we have been neither. 

There can be very few men now alive who knew 
Richard Lord Hertford personally. From Lord 
Esher, who as a youth did know him, I have a letter, 
which he very kindly allows me to quote, giving 
more than one of those little intimate touches 
which lend a spice to narration. But it does more 
than that. It furnishes direct evidence of the truth 
of what I have written about the calumnies by 
which Lord Hertford's character was poisoned by 
people for whom his chief crime was that he did 
not choose to know them. Is it likely, is it even 
possible, that two ladies in a high position like Lord 
Esher's grandmother and mother should have 
visited him in the Rue Lafitte and in the much- 
talked-of Bagatelle had those vile slanders been 



198 Redesdale's Further Memories 

true? The story of Sir Richard Wallace's birth 
and upbringing is conclusive. 
Let the letter speak for itself. 

"Roman Camp, 
"Callander. 

"March 17th, 191 6. 

"My dear Redesdale : 

"I remember being taken, by my grandmother, 
to tea with Richard Marquis of Hertford. He 
lived at the corner of the Rue Lafitte, and his fine 
rooms were crowded with objets d'art — although 
not smothered in clocks, as they afterwards became 
when Wallace and Scott occupied them. Every- 
thing was most sumptuous, but I recollect perfectly 
that when the tea was brought in by a very solemn 
major-domo, whose long grey whiskers I can see 
to this day, Lord Hertford went to a beautiful 
Louis XVI. secretaire, which he unlocked, and 
brought out the sugar-basin, which he carefully 
put away again after tea. (Lord Hertford was a 
very handsome man, but frail and delicate.) Not 
long afterwards my mother and I were invited to 
spend an afternoon at Bagatelle, where Richard 
Wallace entertained us, as Lord Hertford was en- 
gaged — so he sent word — in Paris. The gardens 
were beautiful — as they still are — but the house 
was not so full as the Rue Lafitte. 

"My grandfather, Colonel Gurwood, who had 
served through the Peninsula War in the Light 



The Wallace Collection 199 

Division, was given a captaincy in the 10th Hus- 
sars in 1814, and Richard Seymour joined the regi- 
ment when he was seventeen years old and ten 
years' junior to my grandfather, who became much 
attached to him. This friendship lasted through 
life. 

"I possess three volumes of bound letters to 
Colonel Gurwood from Lord Yarmouth, by which 
name Lord Hertford was known from 1822 to 
1842, when he succeeded his father, Francis, the 
third Marquess of Steyne of 'Vanity Fair.' 

"These letters are interesting, as they contain 
many references to the collection of bric-a-brac 
which Lord Yarmouth and Wallace, his secretary, 
had already commenced to form. Many fine things 
which belonged to my grandfather, and are now the 
property of my sister, were purchased by Lord Yar- 
mouth and Wallace or by their advice. In return, 
my grandfather always bought for Lord Yarmouth 
his riding and driving horses. He used to send 
them to Paris, where Lord Yarmouth lived with his 
mother, Lady Hertford, Maria Fagnani. 

"Many times have I heard my grandmother and 
my mother tell the story of Sir Richard Wallace's 
adoption by Lord Hertford. Wallace was the son 
of Lord Yarmouth by a girl, Agnes Jackson by 
name, who was a kind of fille du regiment of the 
10th hussars, and young Seymour made a home for 
her in Paris while the liaison lasted. There Wal- 
lace was born, and when Seymour parted from his 



200 Redesdale's Further Memories 

mistress, the child was placed with a concierge in 
the Rue de Clichy, where he ran wild under a porte 
cochere until he was about six years old. 

"My grandfather, who had known Agnes Jack- 
son and all about her short-lived liaison with Lord 
Yarmouth, hunted up the boy, and finding he was 
a smart child, showed him to Lady Hertford, Maria 
Fagnani, and induced her to bring him up, much 
against the inclination of her son. 

"There is not, and never was, the slightest foun- 
dation for the absurd legend that Maria Fagnani 
was Sir Richard Wallace's mother, although the 
writer in the 'Dictionary of National Biography/ 
who cannot possibly know anything of the facts, 
adopts it. 

"One of the reasons sometimes given for assum- 
ing that Lord Hertford could not be Wallace's 
father was that there was not more than eighteen 
or nineteen years between their ages. On the other 
hand, it was overlooked that Maria Fagnani was 
very nearly, if not quite, fifty years of age when 
Wallace was born. Anyway, I have no doubt 
whatever that the facts are as I have stated them. 

"They were corroborated, as far as I am con- 
cerned, by the evidence of Madame O de 

B , a lady who for forty years lived on the 

deuxieme etage of the Rue Lafitte and in a beauti- 
ful villa, called St. James, close to Bagatelle. 

"She was a lady of irreproachable life, and virtue 
as stern as that of Madame de Maintenon, whom 



The Wallace Collection 201 

she resembled in many ways. I inherited some of 
the gifts which she had received from Lord Hert- 
ford; among them a fine 'Garter George,' which 
belonged to Prince Charles Edward, and was 
acquired by Francis, third Marquis, from the col- 
lection of Cardinal York. 

"It was destined for my grandfather and his 
children, and Madame O fulfilled her obliga- 
tion. 

"I perfectly remember Sir Richard Wallace's 
son, whose liaison with a French girl bitterly 
offended Sir Richard, although, as he was told by 
the young man when the quarrel was irremediable, 
he had only followed his father's example. 

"Young Wallace came once or twice to London 
after 1870. He died of typhoid fever when still 
a young man. But Wallace would never recognize 
his son's children or their mother ; the former were 
amply provided for by Lady Wallace. Madame 

O de B had no children of her own, but 

she showed great kindness to her connections de 
la main gauche. I perfectly remember the advent 
of Sir John Scott into the Wallace household, and 
the subsequent course of a lifelong devotion to the 
interests of his employers that deserved and ob- 
tained its reward. 

"There is no need to enter into the story of Lady 
Wallace, a very refined, shy and excellent lady, 
although the facts were well known to my family. 

"My French relations were intimate with Lord 



202 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Hertford, Sir Richard Wallace and Sir John Scott, 
over a period extending from 1817 to Scott's death. 

"Yours ever, 

"Esher." 

In a further letter to me Lord Esher very justly 
calls attention to the remarkable likeness between 
Lord Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace. The 
busts at Hertford House demonstrate this. 

Richard, fourth Marquess of Hertford, who 
never married, died at Paris on the 25th of August, 
1870. His successor in the title, Sir Francis (or, 
as his familiars called him, "Franco") Seymour, 
as was natural, hurried over to Paris, not yet be- 
leaguered by the Prussians, to look after his inter- 
ests. He was accompanied by his eldest son and 
his solicitor. The fortune at stake in lands and 
money was great, but, if the value of the works of 
art be taken into account, enormous even in these 
days of plutocratic dominion. The real estate and 
the personalty, taken together, would have reached 
a sum "beyond the dreams of avarice;" indeed, by 
comparison, the boilers and vats of Mr. Thrale 
would have represented no more than a modest 
competence.* 

It must have been a rude shock for the new Lord 
Hertford when the will was read at Bagatelle after 
the funeral, and he found that, barring the settled 

*Mr. Thrale's profits from the brewery were estimated at 
£30,000 a year. 



The Wallace Collection 203 

estates, which without the money were almost a 
white elephant, there was nothing for him. The 
wealth which had given his two predecessors such 
power that, in spite of manifest drawbacks, they 
were propitiated with the Garter, had vanished like 
Alnaschar's dream, and he was left with the unre- 
deemed anxieties and responsibilities of a country 
squire. Equally, it must have been a startling 
shock for Sir Richard to find that he was the heir 
to all that wealth. 

With the exception of a handsome property 
which Lord Hertford bequeathed to his cousin, Sir 
Hamilton Seymour, the famous ex-Ambassador, or 
rather Minister, to Russia, practically everything 
was left to the future Sir Richard Wallace. 

Sir Richard (I call him "Sir" for convenience' 
sake, though he was not created a baronet until the 
following year) lost no time in turning his newly- 
acquired wealth to good account. He was one of 
the most generous men that ever lived. Bravely he 
stood by Paris and the French in their troubles, 
started ambulances, founded the Hertford Hospital 
for poor Englishmen, and set money flowing like 
water in aid of all sufferers by the war. His 
charities in France were boundless, and continued 
throughout his life, and indeed beyond it. But he 
felt it his duty to come to England, and for thirteen 
years represented Lisburn in Parliament — Lisburn, 
which he made the headquarters of his vast Irish 
domain. 



204 Redesdale's Further Memories 

In recognition of the great services which he had 
rendered to the English in Paris during the siege 
he was created a baronet in 1871, when he married 
a French lady, Mademoiselle Castelnau, with whom 
he had lived for many years, and by whom he had 
one son who was an officer in the French Army. 
That son, now long since dead, was the great sor- 
row of Sir Richard's life. The breach between them 
was irreparable, and it made the father miserable. 
He told a friend of mine, an Italian gentleman, 
who was breakfasting with him one day and 
found him in a state of utter dejection, how it irked 
him that people should look upon him as one of the 
happiest of men, when in truth he was the most 
wretched. The sympathy of a good son was the 
solitary thing wanting, and that he never had. 

One friend he had in Mr. Scott, afterwards Sir 
John, who became his private secretary, and whose 
affection stood to him almost in lieu of that a son. 
Sir John's father was a distinguished physician, a 
great personal friend of Sir Richard's. One day 
this gentleman's father-in-law, Mr. Murray, was 
calling upon him, shortly after his inheritance of 
Lord Hertford's possessions, and he happened to 
say that he was badly in need of a private secretary, 
and did not know whom to choose. The post would 
require some unusual qualifications — amongst 
others, a perfect knowledge of French. Mr. Mur- 
ray said that perhaps his grandson, a very young 
barrister just called, might fulfil the conditions. Sir 



The Wallace Collection 205 

Richard jumped at the offer, and the young man 
was sent to be looked at. The result was that he 
found favour in Sir Richard's eyes, and, after pro- 
bation, was appointed. No happier choice could 
have been made, no more devoted and faithful 
friend could have been found ; he remained with Sir 
Richard until his death at Paris in 1890, and con- 
tinued to keep watch over Lady Wallace until her 
end came seven years later. 

The nation hardly knows how much it owes to 
the chivalrous self-effacement of Sir John Scott. 
When Lady Wallace, to whom Sir Richard had left 
everything, was about to make her will, she was 
anxious to bequeath her whole property to Sir John 
in gratitude for the devotion with which he had 
managed her affairs and cared for her interests. 
Sir John persuaded her that it would be a good 
thing if she were, at any rate, to leave the contents 
of Hertford House to the nation, and, moreover, 
that if he were to inherit the entire fortune, there 
might be some suspicion of undue influence. If, 
on the other hand, she gave her chief art treasures 
to England, her memory would be venerated as per- 
haps the country's greatest benefactress, while he 
could gratefully and honourably accept whatever 
else she might be pleased to bequeath to him. The 
lady followed his advice. He was a large-minded 
and generous man, and though, as it turned out, 
he became the heir to a great fortune, if must never 
be forgotten that he might have inherited property 



206 Redesdale's Further Memories 

worth at that time, according to the late Mr. 
Charles Davis's computation, at least seven millions 
sterling, and now, in view of the amazing rise in 
the value of all works of art, perhaps as much more. 
It was a most courageous and loyal piece of self- 
sacrifice. One day, when I said to a man who 
was inclined to scoff, his answer was: "Yes, but 
look at the Death Duties that he would have had 
to pay." He could have met those by the sale 
of half a dozen pictures. Nothing, to my mind, 
can detract from the patriotic wisdom and gene- 
rosity of Sir John's conduct. 

When the greatest collection of art treasures that 
ever was in any private hands became the property 
of the nation, the next question was of how and 
where to house it. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach was 
Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, and he ap- 
pointed a Committee, of which he asked me to be 
a member, to consider the matter. Lord Lans- 
downe was our chairman, and, after careful discus- 
sion, we came to the conclusion that the best plan 
to adopt would be, if possible, to purchase the free- 
hold of Hertford House from the Portman Estate, 
and house the collection in its old home, turning the 
bedrooms on the first floor and the stables into 
galleries. 

There was an idea favoured by Sir Edward 
Poynter that it would be wise to separate some of 
the pictures — the Spanish paintings, for example — 
and place them in the National Gallery; but that 



The Wallace Collection 207 

scheme would have been against the provisions of 
the will, which insisted upon nothing being taken 
from, and nothing added to, the collection as it 
stood, so the proposal could not be entertained. Sir 
Edward would have wished the whole collection 
placed in a building to be erected adjoining the Na- 
tional Gallery; this was also overruled. 
Upon this subject Lord Esher writes : 

"The Committee to which you allude was ap- 
pointed under a Treasury Minute of the 3rd of 
May, 1897. 

"The opponents of the Hertford House scheme, 
headed by Sir Edward Poynter, made a very deter- 
mined resistance. Lord Chilston was First Com- 
missioner of Works, and I, as you know, occupied 
the post which you had filled with so much distinc- 
tion and permanent advantage to the nation. 

"We, who were fighting for the retention of 
Hertford House, owe a heavy debt of gratitude to 
King Edward, then Prince of Wales, who, with 
unerring instinct in such matters, grasped at once 
the historical and aesthetic advantages of keeping 
the collections intact and in situ. 

"We were also largely indebted to Sir Francis 
Mowatt, then Secretary to the Treasury, who 
afforded us unfailing and generous support. 

"The purchase of the leasehold and freehold 
interest in the house cost £74,620. 



208 Redesdale's Further Memories 

"The structural alterations about £28,000, and 
electric light, heating and painting, £259 16s. 

"In August, 1898, at your instance, I took the 
decorative work, to a very great extent, out of the 
hands of the Office of Works' contractor. I remem- 
ber that the paper used in the large picture gallery, 
the selection of which had given us a great deal 
of trouble, was copied from a piece of Italian silk 
which we borrowed from Bertram, who lived in 
Dean Street, Soho. Alfred Rothschild then, as 
always, took a deep interest in Hertford House, 
and his advice was invaluable to us all." 

A Board of Trustees was then appointed, consist- 
ing of Lord Rosebery, as chairman, who gave way 
to Sir John Scott, Sir Edward Malet, Sir John 
Stirling Maxwell, Sir Arthur Ellis, Mr. Alfred de 
Rothschild and myself. Mr. — now Sir — Claude 
Phillips, that distinguished connoisseur and critic, 
was appointed keeper. The Office of Works con- 
structed the new Galleries according to our plan, 
and a Committee of the Trustees undertook the 
arrangement of the collection. Sir John Scott, Mr. 
Alfred de Rothschild and myself, with Sir Claude 
Phillips, worked day after day for many months, 
evolving kosmos out of a chaos of packing-cases. 
It was a huge task, but when the Galleries were 
finally thrown open, we were rewarded by a chorus 
of approbation, and the praise of foreign critics 
was no less loud than that of our own friends. Our 



The Wallace Collection 209 

leading idea was, as far as possible, to avoid the 
museum aspect, and to show the pictures, clocks, 
furniture, porcelain, etc., as the collection of a great 
connoisseur set out as if he were still living in the 
house. The trustees were fortunate in securing the 
generous co-operation of Sir Guy Laking in the 
arrangement, and cataloguing of the armour. It 
may readily be believed that it was no small sorrow 
to us when, owing to the war, all our work had to 
be undone in order to stow away our treasures in 
safety. I, for one, can hardly expect to live to see 
the reawakening of the old glory. I can only hope 
that when that time comes something of the former 
order may be restored. 

One morning — it was the 17th of January, 1912 
— I received an urgent message by telephone, beg- 
ging me to go to Hertford House at once. Sir John 
Scott had died there suddenly. When I reached 
Manchester Square, I found him lying in the 
Trustees' room. He had been discussing business 
with Mr. MacColl, who had succeeded Sir Claude 
Phillips as keeper, when all of a sudden he began 
to have a difficulty in breathing. He said it was 
nothing, but he grew worse. Doctors were sent 
for, but there was nothing to be done. That large- 
hearted man died in the house where he had lived 
so long, and surrounded by all the beautiful things 
which he loved and which he had been the means 
of securing for the nation when he might have had 



210 Redesdale's Further Memories 

them for himself. The Government had made him 
a baronet. Lord Rosebery, with a keen apprecia- 
tion of what he had done, said to me in righteous 
jest: "They have made him a baronet when they 
ought to have made him a duke." 



CHAPTER VII 
A Note on Russian Studies 

A FEW days ago — I am writing on the 7th 
of August, 191(5 — I read in the Times a 
long speech by one of our preterpluperf ect 
rulers, in which was announced the determina- 
tion of the Government to encourage the study of 
Russian, on account of its glorious literature. I 
think the adjective was "glorious," but, at any rate, 
it was some such word. Was there ever a better 
example of the danger of giving reasons? Had 
this illustrious gentleman deigned to glance at some 
such easily accessible book as Mr. Maurice Baring's 
delightful little "Outline of Russian Literature," 
he would have been saved from talking such non- 
sense. 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century liter- 
ature in Russia was like the snakes in Iceland. Nor 
can it be said that the new development which took 
place early in that century was a rinascimento such 
as spring into being in Italy, in France and in Eng- 
land. A new birth implies a previous state of 
existence, and it cannot be said that the old chron- 
icles which the dryasdusts of Kiev — the old head- 
quarters of such monkish learning as existed — still 

2iz 



212 Redesdale's Further Memories 

less a few embryonic attempts at versification and 
dramatic writing, could be dignified by the inspiring 
title of literature. "The Russian language" — to 
quote Mr. Baring — "was, as has been said, like an 
instrument waiting for a great player to play on 
it, and to make use of all its possibilities." The 
fables of Kryloff — a playwright whose dramas 
have long since been forgotten — were published in 
1806, and these remain a classic. Out of the two 
hundred fables which he left at his death in 1844, 
forty were translations, or, rather, "recreations," 
as Mr. Baring puts it, of La Fontaine ; seven were 
suggested by Aesop; the remainder were original. 
As in all fables, these contain an element of satire ; 
that here and there the satire should be tinged with 
even a spice of political acidity did not hinder their 
popularity. I should like to say in passing, that the 
few pages which Mr. Baring devotes to his account 
of Krylov contain passages of great beauty — pas- 
sages which could only have been written by a man 
gifted with the keenest appreciation of the poetry 
which is part of himself. 

It was in 18 16, that with Karamzin's monu- 
mental work, "The Chronicles of Russia," the liter- 
ature of that country burst into existence, like 
Pallas Athene fully armed from the head of Zeus. 
"Not only were the undreamed-of riches of the 
Russian language revealed to the Russians in the 
style, but the subject matter came as a surprise." 
Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet that ever lived, 







n.// /»*? 






IVAN TURGENIEV 

From an etching by E. Hedouin 




A Note on Russian Studies 213 

or probably ever will live, was the next great star 
that appeared upon the firmament, and he declared 
that Karamzin had revealed Russia to the Russians, 
just as Columbus discovered America. To Karam- 
zin's glorious prose and to Pushkin's immortal verse 
belong the first honours in the belles-lettres of 
of Russia. 

Fifty years and more have passed since I read 
Gogol's "Dead Souls" in the original. The striv- 
ings and hard work of a somewhat strenuous life 
have swept away the little that I knew of Russian 
authors and literature. I am now obliged to walk 
upon the crutches of translations, though now and 
then a faint memory is in some mysterious way 
awakened, and the interest, at any rate, has not 
faded. 

Such names as Turgeniev, whom I once met, 
DostoiefTski, and the two Tolstoys, have still a 
magic charm for me. Besides, all the world can 
prate of them. Of the host of lesser novelists, 
mostly translated by ladies, in my judgment the less 
said the better. The work of obviously coarse, un- 
instructed men, they often, both in their narration 
and in their imagery, deal with subjects which are 
unwholesome and which common consent rejects as 
unsuitable. Literature does not scramble about in 
midden heaps. 

And the great ones — what is their place in the 
history of the world's achievements? I very much 
doubt whether there be any among the most 



214 Redesdale's Further Memories 

patriotic enthusiasts who would claim even for his 
beloved Pushkin a seat on Parnassus beside Homer, 
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Vol- 
taire. That Karamzin's prose was of the very first 
order is proved by Pushkin's appreciation of him. 
Unfortunately it can only appeal to a very small 
public. Twelve volumes of chronicles, essential to 
the Russian student of his own country's story, 
will hardly be faced by the average foreigner. 

Puskin's activities were phenomenal. That in 
the thirty-seven years of his tragically short life 
he should have wrought what he did, and that he 
should have been so uniformly good, invests him 
with a glamour which is all his own. He was a 
meteor, and, like a meteor, he appeared as it were 
for a moment in the sky, and then vanished into 
space. And yet half a century ago, among the men 
who were the leaders of thought in Petersburg, 
there was far less talk of Pushkin than there was 
of Dante, Shakespeare, or Voltaire — not to speak 
of many other foreign authors. 

It has taken many years to create the revival of 
the interest of Russians in Russian work. It has 
come at last, and now the only danger is lest, under 
much flattery and patting on the back from abroad, 
the true advance of public taste should not be rather 
hindered than furthered. Pushkin, be it remem- 
bered, was highly cultivated, a man of wide read- 
ing. He recognized the fact that in order to write 
well a man must read well, and study the best 



A Note on Russian Studies 215 

models. Some of his criticisms of Shakespeare and 
of Byron, under whose influence he was until 
Shakespeare dethroned his idol, are masterpieces. 

It seems to me that the State encouragement of 
Russian studies will be of high value as promoting 
facility of intercourse — especially in the case of the 
Services, naval, military and civil. A far higher, 
even world-wide importance attaches to the estab- 
lishment of schools of modern languages all over 
Russia. It is of less moment that the literature 
of Russia, in its present condition, should travel 
westward than that the literature of the West 
should gradually influence the mind of the Slav. 
Just as in music the wild barbaric outbursts of his 
gayer moods, the tender sadness of his dirges, have 
been enshrined in the harmonies of his own classic 
masters without losing one spark of their fire, one 
sob of their pathos, so the untutored writer of to- 
day, chastened by study, will be able to give us the 
freshness and zest of a life which is not ours, shorn 
of all its crudities, not to give them a worse name. 
Let us not be misunderstood. What I think is of 
consequence is that the startling audacity, the rough 
ore of the Slav mind, should be passed through the 
purifying furnace of the higher education it was in 
Pushkin's case — all honour to him — and then you 
will have something worthy of the praise which is 
being rained upon the shameless translations by 
ladies, themselves ill-equipped by classic culture, of 
the cubism of literary art. 



CHAPTER VIII 
Verba Composita 

IN the first volume of my "Memories" there is 
a print of a drawing by William Evans, of 
the inglenook in the picturesque dining-hall 
of his house at Eton. Above the stone screen in 
which it was held was a legend in Gothic letters: 
"Favus mellis verba composita." The words had 
disappeared for many years when I went to place 
my son with Miss Evans — so long that she had 
even forgotten their existence when I asked the 
reason why. To us old boys it seemed a pity, for 
the inscription had derived a certain sanctity from 
the scholastic storm which raged round it. The 
learned would not accept the legend. No one could 
say whence the quotation or proverb came. Dr. 
Hawtrey, to whom the pure well of Latin undefiled 
was almost a religion with which to tamper was 
little short of sacrilege, declared that it was a bar- 
barism, a piece of dog, or, what was perhaps to him 
as bad, monkish Latin. He maintained that it was 
untranslatable ; but we, audacious monkeys, rushing 
in where scholars feared to tread, declared that if 
the words were obscure, the meaning was clear as 
crystal: "Sweet as the honeycomb is the talk of 

216 



Verba Composita 217 

friends in council." Here I would fain break off 
for a moment to pay a slight tribute to the memory 
of that most generous of men, William Evans, 
drawing-master and, though one of the most mas- 
culine of mortals, technically a "dame." He was 
a big, burly man, of a jovial and rubicund aspect, 
a combination which earned for him the nickname 
of Beeves. He was a vigorous painter in water- 
colours, a member of the old water-colour society, 
and one of the best of good fellows. 

A sportsman, too, for he was the friend of the 
late Duke of Atholl, spending most of his summer 
holiday at Blair, where he was always welcome as 
an enthusiastic stalker. Indeed, "Scrope's Deer- 
stalking" was the only book that I remember ever 
to have seen him read. I went to see him once as 
he lay in bed, very feeble, at the beginning of his 
last long illness. On the wall, at his right hand, 
were hanging his dearly-beloved rifle, his powder- 
flask, and the other paraphernalia of those pre- 
breechloader days. In his youth he had been a great 
oarsman, and, indeed, the river was his joy till quite 
late in life. 

He took the greatest interest in all that con- 
cerned boating and swimming, and it was owing to 
his influence, in conjunction with that of the noble 
Bishop Selwyn, of whom Eton is still so proud, that 
the law was passed by the authorities forbidding 
boys to enter a boat until they should have "passed" 
in swimming. Of the good bishop a story is told 



218 Redesdale's Further Memories 

of the time when he was a private tutor at Eton 
which is worth preserving. He was sculling in a 
wherry amid a crowd of boats, when he was run 
into by some unskilled oarsman. Seeing that ship- 
wreck was inevitable, he stood up, and, quoting 
Ovid's description of the discreet death of Lucretia, 
exclaimed : 

"Tunc quoque, jam moriens, ne non procumbat honeste 
Respicit, hoc etiam cura cadenti erat." 

Fasti II., 831. 

And so, with a header as graceful as the quota- 
tion was apt, the amphibious bishop that was to be, 
dived into the Thames amid the plaudits of the mul- 
titude, who already recognized in him the heroism 
of which he was to give proof in New Zealand and 
elsewhere. 

Evans' was a very happy house, and the good old 
man spared nothing for the comfort of his boys. 
The table which he kept was excellent, the Sunday 
dinner quite a little feast, with a glass of sherry 
for each boy at plum-pudding time — not altogether 
wise we should perhaps think nowadays, but so 
kind and so hospitable. Rarely, too, would he fail 
to invite one or two boys to stay for dessert. The 
traditions of the house were notably carried on by 
Miss Jennie Evans after her father's death in 1877. 
And now she, too, has disappeared, the last of the 
dames, the last of one of those dear old institutions 
which were part of the mystery of Eton. 

To remember is to wander, and when I begin to 



Verba Composita 219 

think of Eton — the Eton of seventy years ago — it 
is easier to ramble on than prudently to stop. But 
to-day I have only to deal with "Verba Composita." 
It is of them that I was thinking this morning as I 
sat in my Veluvana, and, indeed, there could hardly 
be a more pregnant thought than that of the talk 
of friends in council. 

How perfect is the feeling with which, in the 
company of a familiar friend of our own choice, 
we wander through the shaded paths and sweet 
groves of our sanctuary. Nor is it necessary that 
the chosen comrade should be himself a botanist or 
a gardener. Sympathy is all that is asked of him, 
and that he will not deny. Indeed, there is some- 
thing in the worship of the great god Pan, and in 
the living, growing temples which are raised in his 
honour, which makes for all that is best in the inter- 
course between man and man. 

A beautiful view, a discreet arrangement of 
flowers and graceful foliage, will rouse congenial 
memories of books, of poetry, of pictures, and 
sometimes even of melody. The sight of a plant 
recognized even by the unskilled as an old friend 
of some distant clime, seen again after many years, 
will excite a whole train of recollections fragrant 
with the perfume of half-forgotten travels and ad- 
ventures. So may two greybeards sit happily in 
some remote nook, the home of fairies and dryads, 
where the trees whisper old thoughts and call up 



220 Redesdale's Further Memories 

sympathetic talk, broken and yet stimulated afresh 
by "brilliant flashes of silence.'' 

All the better is this solitude a deux if there 
should be the tinkling music of a tiny stream, with 
the electric gleam of a kingfisher darting across 
some idle sunlit pool. All these wield that magic 
power which, for the nonce charming away the 
wrinkles of time, transports us across the long 
years back to the days when the world and we were 
young and life meant hope. Rare, indeed, and very 
precious are such dreamy talks and silences. We 
can hardly rate their value too highly. The crazy 
poet-philosopher Nietzsche was not far wrong 
when, in a letter to Erwin Rohde, he wrote: "Eter- 
nally we need midwives in order to be delivered of 
our thoughts. Most people go to a public-house, or 
to a colleague whose mind is solely occupied with 
the interests of their calling, and there, like so many 
small cats, they tumble about all their thoughts and 
tiny schemes. But woe to us who lack the sunlight 
of a friend's presence !" 

It was a fine thought of his to elevate friendship 
to the rank of a goddess. But, alas, for the incon- 
sistencies of genius ! Few of Nietzsche's hot friend- 
ships had any lasting power. Rohde himself, Ree 
and others faded out of his life. But no change was 
so violent as that which occurred in the relations 
between the philosopher and the tone-poet Wagner. 
The historic friendship — born of an admiration for 
Schopenhauer shared by both, and of an adoration 



Verba Composita 221 

by Nietzsche of Wagner's music — ripened so 
quickly and was so beautiful, that it ought to have 
lived with their lives; but this alliance between a 
budding youth and an older, already famous man 
came to the saddest end. 

Suddenly the fruit grew mouldy and fell from 
the tree, and the love which had seemed to be built 
upon a rock, the worship which was so full of pious 
conviction, were changed into a hatred which was 
nothing short of venomous, and which not since the 
death of Wagner could compel to silence. They 
had first met at Leipsic, at the house of Professor 
Brockhaus, and Wagner, touched by the boy's en- 
thusiasm, took to him at once, petted him, and en- 
couraged him to go and visit him, which he did a 
few years later at Triebschen, Wagner's retreat 
under the shadow of Mount Pilatus. 

Wonderful gatherings, indeed, have been held 
throughout the ages in groves and gardens. 
Imagine the Baghavat, the Blessed One, sur- 
rounded by his Bikshus, as poor as the first follow- 
ers of St. Francis, preaching the doctrines of truth 
and humility in those parables that are dear to the 
Eastern, seated in one or other of his beloved gar- 
dens. Think of the sages of ancient Athens gath- 
ered together in the groves of the Akademia dis- 
cussing the deep problems of existence. How much 
more instinct with the poetry of life must such 
grave and reverend companies have been than the 
boisterous though delightful tavern symposia in 



222 Redesdale's Further Memories 

which Christopher North, Tickler, the Ettrick 
Shepherd and their friends slung Doric wit and 
wisdom over the toddy glasses ! We can easily see 
how the interchange of thought between the great 
trio, Wagner, Frau Cosima and Nietzsche, in a 
lovely Swiss garden, surrounded by the majesty of 
the Alps, must have been enshrined in such mem- 
ories as those over which the philosopher mourned 
so long as the lamp of life burned in him. 

When the other day I was reading Dr. Mtigge's 
account of the trio at Triebschen, Wagner, Frau 
Cosima and Nietzsche, and of their deep interest 
in one another's ideals, the old motto, "Sweet as 
the honeycomb is the talk of friends in council," 
of which I had not thought for many a decade, 
came back to me, and I understood how Nietzsche, 
long years after he had quarrelled with Wagner — 
indeed, shortly before his death — declared that "he 
would resign all human intercourse, but at no price 
would be give up the pleasant memories of those 
days spent in Triebschen. " The honey of those 
Verba Composita was still sweet in the comb. 

For the quarrel between the two men there may 
be explanations and excuses; such changes are not 
without precedent. The first link between them 
was, as I have said, devotion to Schopenhauer. 
"Nietzsche called his connection with Wagner his 
practical course in Schopenhauer's philosophy." 
When Nietzsche began to dream of a philosophy of 
his own, the tie between him and the poet-composer 



Verba Composita 223 

was weakened; there was also perhaps some feel- 
ing that he was being made use of, that he was 
being patronized and made to play second fiddle 
to a man whom he was beginning to look down upon 
as a mere play-actor — a mummer — a child of the 
theatre. 

Miigge throws out a hint that in breaking with 
Wagner, Nietzsche was possibly fleeing from him- 
self, and he quotes a note from him to Frau Cosima : 
"Ariadne, I love you! Dionysus." Whatever may 
have been the cause, or the many causes, of the rup- 
ture, its violence was, at any rate on Nietzsche's 
side, maniacal. His venom was not less poisonous 
than that which Devadatta poured out upon the 
Buddha. Not content with having hurled his 
Jupiter, as he called him, from his throne on high 
Olympus, he must needs pursue him into the depths, 
trampling on him, and covering with mud the man 
whom he had once beslavered with the most ful- 
some adulation. Strange litanies for the high 
priest of the goddess of Friendship to intone ! 

Far less intelligible is the change of front in re- 
gard to Wagner's music. That the man who, for 
the apotheosis of Wagner's art, wrote "The Birth 
of Tragedy in Music," should so completely eat his 
words as to the worth of the music because he had 
ceased to love the musician is almost unthinkable. 

In the first period he tells us that : "From a novice 
trying his strength, Wagner became a thorough 
master of music and of the theatre. ... No one 



224 Redesdale's Further Memories 

will any longer deny him the glory of having given 
us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution. 
The renewer of the simple drama, the discoverer of 
the position due to art in true German society, the 
poetic interpreter of old views of life, the phil- 
osopher, the historian, the aesthete and critic, the 
master of languages, the mythologist and the myth 
poet, who for the first time included all these won- 
derful and beautiful products of a primitive 
imagination in a single Ring, upon which he en- 
graved the runic characters of his thoughts — what 
an abundance of knowledge Wagner must have had 
in order to have become all that !" 

Again: "Over the coming of Wagner there 
hovers a necessity which both justifies it and makes 
it glorious." "Wagner, in his capacity as supreme 
master of form, points out the way, like Aeschylus, 
to a future art." "In the life of this great man, 
the period over which as a golden reflection there 
is stretched the splendour of a supreme perfection. 
. . . He produces Tristan and Isolde, this opus 
metaphysicum of all art; the Meister singer of 
Nurnberg; the Ring of the Nibelungs; his work of 
Bayreuth."* 

There is much more in the same strain, but when 
we come to the second period it is another Nietzsche 
who speaks. He now attacks his former idol with 
the most ferocious rancour, for which only insanity 
could account; and yet that he was not then mad 

*Miigge, pp. 131, 134. 




FRIEDKICH NIETZSCHE 
From a photograph 



Verba Composita 225 

is proved by other utterances of his in regard to 
that same art of music. For instance: "Mendels- 
sohn was the beautiful interlude of German music, 
quickly admired and then quickly forgotten. Schu- 
mann was the last who founded a school. Though 
incessantly glowing with happiness or throbbing 
with impersonal suffering, he was a purely German 
event, and not, as Beethoven and Mozart had been, 
a European phenomenon." 

That — although I should not agree as to Men- 
delssohn being forgotten — appears to me to be, as 
regards Schumann, a fine piece of criticism. Ap- 
parently it was only when thinking of Wagner that 
he was up to that time insane. Then he could lash 
himself into a fury! Witness: "I call the Wag- 
nerian orchestration the Sirocco; Bizet's" (of 
whose success Wagner was supremely jealous) 
"orchestral music is almost the sole orchestration 
that I can still endure. . . . Schopenhauer was 
the philosopher of decadence. His art is morbid. 
. . . Wagner has been ruinous to music. Was 
Wagner a musician at all ? He was at least some- 
thing else in a higher degree — that is to say, an un- 
surpassable actor. Wagner was, above all, a stage- 
player, and he excels in ubiquity and nullibiety. 
. . . Parsifal is a candidate for divinity with a 
public-school education. We are so far pure fools 
already ... a typical telegram from Bayreuth: 
Bereits bereut (rued already) ! Ah! this old thief! 
This old magician! This Cagliostro of modernity! 



226 Redesdale's Further Memories 

. . . Wagner is a Romanist, and he made the poor 
devil, the country lad Parsifal, a Roman Catholic. 
I despise every one who does not regard Parsifal 
as an outrage on morals." 

Perhaps Wagner's faithful disciples were right 
when they ascribed all outpouring of the vials of 
wrath to jalousie de metier; for Nietzsche, too, was 
not only poet and philosopher, but composer, and 
when he sumbitted an opera of his own to Wagner, 
the great man, as the Eastern saying is, made sour 
noses at it. 

It is dangerous to carry a book with you into a 
garden; it will make your mind wander much fur- 
ther than your feet. Here have I been rambling on, 
carried away not so much by any feeling for 
Nietzsche, who is, after all, not much more than a 
name to me, as by the interest which attaches to 
all that concerns Wagner. For, let his enemies say 
what they will, he was a man of genius, of most 
compelling genius, and who that ever had speech 
of Frau Cosima could avoid being bewitched. To 
me it has only been given to know her in her old age, 
but I fell at once under the spell of that most sweet 
and dainty personality. Very feeble in health, and 
unable to speak for long, she had retained all the 
serene charm which, in the heyday of her youth and 
beauty, earned for her the name of "the unique 
woman." I felt how bright a part she must have 
played in the brilliant trio at Triebschen, and how 
sad it is that there should be no record of the 



Verba Composite 227 

symposia of the sunny days of that happy friend- 
ship before it was disturbed by mad envy and 
malice. 

Of Nietzsche and his tragic end, of the influence 
which his restless brain exercised upon men and 
upon letters, this is not the place to speak. Is it 
he, as his disciples maintain, who has taught Ger- 
many and, through Germany, the world to think? 
The great anti-moralist, as he has been called, is 
dead. Let him rest in peace. We can leave this 
Batrachomyomachia, this battle of the frogs and 
mice, the squabbles of German professors and phil- 
osophers, coming back with some relief to the 
sweeter fragrance of our flowers. It was the 
thought of Triebschen and its Verba Composita 
which led us to Nietzsche, and his clever saying that 
seemed to give value to the thought of friendship in 
a garden. 

Days of happy talk are delightful — never more 
so than in a garden; and yet it is when we are 
alone, when our plants are the companions of our 
solitude, that we really enter into sympathy with 
them. Then it is that we hold true communion with 
them, and, giving the reins to our imagination, try 
to read the hidden secrets of their being — hidden 
secrets, not those scientific arcana which your pro- 
fessor loves to clothe in slipshod Latin and shabby 
Greek, but those inmost idiosyncrasies in which our 
fancy, wildly playful, seems to detect vestiges of 
the same characteristics and emotions which rule as 



228 Redesdale's Further Memories 

tyrants in our own nature. Nor when we note the 
movements of plants, so strangely purposeful, does 
it involve any inordinate strain upon our conceptive 
power to see in them something more than chance, 
something which resembles the exercise of a domi- 
nant will. These may be thoughts at which science 
laughs, and which the inexorable demon Common- 
sense hounds out of court — thoughts that are no 
more than poor little waifs and strays, coming to 
us from Fancyland, and yet not without their 
humble value if they do but make us watch and seek 
for things undreamt of in our philosophy. 

That certain flowers and plants are, as it were, 
types of various qualities is an idea as old as the 
hills upon which they grow. The strength of the 
oak, the grace of the willow, the flaunting pride of 
poppies, the virginal purity of lilies, the stateliness 
of hollyhocks like courtiers drawn up in a row at 
the levee of a mighty king, the modesty of the 
violet — all these and a hundred others are images 
from the wallets of poets of all lands and of all 
time. It is not of these that I speak, but rather of 
the behaviour of plants, often very various and 
capricious, according to circumstances, yet in which 
we seem to see a kinship with reasonable motive, 
a suggestion that in similar conditions we might 
have done the same. 

See yonder crimson water-lily queening it in all 
the majesty of her amazing beauty among the 
humbler reeds and rushes and sedges and the rest 



Verba Composita 229 

of her water-loving subjects. To-day she is in the 
zenith of her state, like the king's daughter all 
glorious within. Does she rejoice in the stateliness 
of her queenship? It would almost seem so, for 
to-morrow she will feel that her reign is over. She 
will bow her lovely neck, and, coyly folding her 
petals together round the golden aureole of her 
stamens, will disappear under the flood, too proud 
to let herself be seen when her regal beauty is on 
the wane. Is not that something like the pride 
of which we read in the life of the peerless Countess 
Castiglione, who hid herself from the gaze of men 
before her charms had faded, as she knew they 
soon must? Having reigned supreme among the 
fair women of the world, she would not consent to 
be degraded into a has-been — a thing of the past. 
I have told in my "Memories" of the first time that 
I saw her on the terrace at Holland House, a miracle 
of loveliness, when all London was crowding on tip- 
toe to catch a sight of the haughty queen of beauty 
and do homage to her majesty. My nymphsea 
tempts me to repeat myself. The last time was a 
few years later. I was sitting with Mario and Grisi 
in their garden at Fulham when she was announced. 
She came in robed in deepest black, her face hidden 
by a thick veil of sable crepe. She remained a little 
while and talked gaily enough, but her face re- 
mained hidden all the time ; not for one moment did 
she lift that funereal veil. She had forsaken the 
world — abdicated — like my coy crimson water-lily, 



230 Redesdale's Further Memories 

and in the waters of Lethe she hid her beauteous 
head. 

Have plants their friendships, their affinities? 
Certain it is that there are some plants which seem 
to thrive best when familiarly associated with cer- 
tain others. I have heard some gardeners say, for 
instance, that lilies of the valley and Solomon's seal 
are never so happy as when they are planted to- 
gether. That may be true, but it probably means 
no more than that both need the same soil and sur- 
roundings, and so make the bravest show when they 
are side by side. I much doubt whether a weak 
clump of lilies of the valley would be strengthened 
by adding to it a cluster of plants of its friend, or 
vice versa. 

On the other hand, it is a scientific fact capable 
of demonstration, that there are trees which press 
into their service certain humbler non-flowering 
plants, compelling them to furnish their roots with 
water and such mineral salts and foods as are need- 
ful for their well-being. These become slaves, like 
the hewers of wood and drawers of water working 
for the lords of creation. 

Many years ago I received a consignment of 
Pinus cembra, the Arolla pine, which is the common 
growth of the Alps. The trees arrived late in the 
afternoon, and we unpacked them at once, for the 
days were at their shortest, and I was eager to get 
them all planted — there were a dozen or more — 
before nightfall. To my dismay I found that the 



Verba Composita 231 

roots were all covered with a network of grey film, 
the mycelium, as the learned would call it, or some 
fungus. My gardener and I were not a little in- 
dignant with the nurseryman who sent out the 
plants in so filthy a condition. We sent for a bucket 
of water and washed clean as many of the trees as 
we could ; mercifully there was not daylight enough 
left to purge them all of their dirt. To our amaze- 
ment, the trees which we washed soon began to 
show signs of sickness; they dwindled for three of 
four years and looked as if they must die; slowly, 
very slowly, the invalids recovered. Their un- 
washed mates never flinched for a moment, made 
roots gaily, and took quite rapidly to their new 
home. The puzzle was great, until a few years 
later I received Kerner's great book, "The Natural 
History of Plants," and then the mystery was 
cleared up. The sorrows of the washed trees were 
those of the planters of the West Indian Islands. 
Like Mr. Wilberforce, we had deprived them of 
their slaves. Luckily, the humus of the plantation 
in which they were placed must have contained the 
spores necessary to the formation of the fungoid 
growth, otherwise they would doubtless have died. 
Kerner's chapter on the Symbiosis, or social 
union of plants, is curiously interesting. He gives 
a list of flowering trees and plants which are abso- 
lutely dependent upon what he called the mycelial 
-mantle with which fungi cover their roots for the 
absorption of their daily food. Limes, roses, ivy, 



232 Redesdale's Further Memories 

pinks may be propagated by cuttings which will root 
in pure sand. No such method is possible in the 
case of the oak, the beech, firs, broom, rhododen- 
dron, and a host of others, which demand an ad- 
mixture of soil containing a proportion of mycelia, 
without which they are unable to feed themselves; 
and so, like babies, with neither breast nor bottle 
they perish. 

Kerner's opening words on this symbiosis are 
worth quoting: "In describing the vegetation of a 
limited area, botanical writers are apt to designate 
the various species of plants as 'denizens' of the 
country in question. The conditions under which 
the plants live are likened to political institutions, 
and the relations existing amongst the plants them- 
selves are compared to the life and strife of human 
society." He goes on to speak of the interdepend- 
ence upon one another of these plants living in the 
same community ; he shows how necessary they are 
to one another ; how they sometimes fight for food, 
light and air; how some are preyed upon and op- 
pressed by others, "and how not infrequently quite 
different species join together in order to attain 
some mutual advantage." And so he comes to the 
curious history of the lichens. 

Some forty or fifty years ago there arose a furi- 
ous battle around the lichens, humble little creatures 
enough, plastered on almost every rock and stone 
and tree in creation. During the 'sixties of the last 
century Schwendener, a Swiss botanist — professor 



Verba Composita 233 

successively at Basle, Tubingen and Berlin — wrote 
a number of papers in scientific publications, in 
which he proved to his own satisfaction that lichens 
are not individual plants, but compound existences 
consisting of an alga and a fungus. His investiga- 
tions were followed up by one Bornet, and he had 
a numerous following largely attracted by the 
charm of novelty and the ingenuity of invention. 
Kerner went so far as to say that "the continued 
study of lichens has tended only to secure for the 
Schwendenerian theory a more wide and universal 
recognition." Dr. Cook, however, the great au- 
thority on cryptogamic botany, laughs at this mys- 
tic union as a "fairy tale." He treats it with the 
same contempt that St. Paul, in his letter to Titus, 
expressed for "Jewish fables." He says: "The 
high priest Schwendener thus expressed his dream : 
'As the result of my researches, all these growths 
(lichens) are not simple plants, not individuals in 
the ordinary sense of the word; they are rather 
colonies, which consist of hundreds and thousands 
of individuals, of which, however, one alone plays 
the master, whilst the rest, in perpetual captivity, 
prepare the nutriment for themselves and their 
master. This master is a fungus of the class 
ascomyceter, a parasite which is accustomed to live 
upon others' work ; its slaves are green algae, which 
it has sought out, or, indeed, caught hold of, and 
compelled into its service. It surrounds them, as 
a spider its prey, with a fibrous net of narrow 



234 Redesdale's Further Memories 

meshes, which is gradually converted into an im- 
penetrable covering ; but whilst the spider sucks its 
prey and leaves it dead, the fungus incites the algae 
found in its net to more rapid activity — nay, to 
more vigorous increase.' " 

Dr. Cook goes on to say: "This may be all very 
poetical, but it is not very explicit, and needs a 
commentary ;" and then he proceeds to demolish the 
whole theory based upon the supposition that the 
gonidia, green spherical cells, which are found in 
the thallus of lichens are algae. Lichens, Dr. Cook 
tells us, consist normally of a thallus, or vegetative 
system, which is in many species a tough, bark-like 
expansion, horizontal or vertical, attached to rocks, 
stones, wood and other substances, but not deriving 
nourishment from the object to which it is attached. 
Inside this thallus are the minute green gonidia, 
and, in addition, there is the reproductive system, 
consisting of discs borne upon the thallus, contain- 
ing the reproductive organs (asci and sporidia). 
The Schwendenerians contend that the thallus and 
reproductive system are not only fungoid, but actual 
fungi, while the green gonidia are algae upon which 
those fungi are parasitic. 

One of the proofs which Dr. Cook brings for- 
ward in support of his contradiction of the theorists 
is the permanence of lichens, whereas the fungi are, 
as we all know, very short-lived, many of them little 
more than ephemeral — here to-day and gone to- 
morrow. To the lichens we must pay the respect 



Verba Composita 235 

due to the most venerable antiquity. Dr. Cook, 
speaking with all the authority with which he is 
endowed, tells us that "some species, growing on 
primitive rocks of the highest mountains of the 
world, are estimated to have attained an age of at 
least a thousand years. Is it not marvellous to think 
of these mean little vegetable scabs feeding upon 
air, outliving the monarch oaks and almost all the 
trees of Creation?" 

But I am in danger of rushing in where the 
angels of science hardly dare tread. Let me go 
back to my beloved nonsense. Beloved? Yes, for, 
after all, what is more lovable than nonsense? 
What a joy their nonsense must have been to Dean 
Swift, to Lear, or to the little dry chip of a man 
who was our Cocker, our mathematical tutor, at 
Christ Church. I wonder whether, when Dodgson, 
that double personality, always associated in my 
memory with a blackboard, a piece of chalk and 
x y z, was writing up his mystic algebraical puzzles, 
his mind did not sometimes wander, and he him- 
self become transformed for a minute into Lewis 
Carroll seeing visions of Alice, the Carpenter, the 
Mad Hatter, the Walrus, and all the crazy dramatis 
personce of his delicious phantasy. He is dead now, 
and many years ago the lovely child, for whose de- 
lectation the wonder book was invented, was laid 
in an early grave in the Christ Church cloisters. 
Only Alice lives, and will live as long as the English 
language remains. 



236 Redesdale's Further Memories 

If your garden be upon the slope of a hill, there 
is one human instinct which you will surely, if you 
watch them carefully, recognize in your plants. 
They are so ambitious. Those among them which 
have creeping roots or rhizomes will almost invari- 
ably travel uphill. They are as fain to climb as 
Sir Walter Raleigh himself. Take the rhizomatous 
bamboos, such species among the arundonarias as 
Somoni, Japonica Laycekerd, Spathiflora and 
others, Phyllostachys fastuosa, Bambusa Palmata. 
Rarely, indeed, will you find a new culm below the 
parent plant; all the growth is upwards. And so 
it is with many other genera. I think the reason of 
it is pretty plain. You need but to mark the trees 
above a railway cutting or on the high banks of 
a deep lane, to see how shallow in proportion to 
their height are the roots even of the greatest of 
them. There are exceptions — the vine and the 
laburnum, to wit — but the oak itself loses its so- 
called tap-root, which withers and rots away as 
soon as it has fulfilled its duty of tying the tree 
in its place. The roots seem to remain as near as 
possible to the plane of the bottom of the main 
stem. The same rule applies to plants of lesser 
stature. Now if the roots of a hillside plant were 
to move down-hill in the same plane as the axis of 
the stem, it is manifest that they must very soon 
peer out into the open and be deprived of all those 
foods which are necessary to plant life. So they 
choose the wise course of journeying upwards, 



Verba Composita 237 

where they are sure, on the contrary, of an increas- 
ingly richer diet. If on its travels the growing 
point of a bamboo rhizome encounters a stone or 
other obstacle, it will not dive down to avoid it, 
but will take a direction upwards and then down 
again into the earth, forming one of those hoops, 
like croquet hoops, which are such a snare to trip 
up wayfarers in bamboo forests. Sometimes the 
ambitions of plants, like those of men, are fatal. 
The root-stock, originally set in the best conditions, 
must needs climb higher and higher, until it may 
perhaps reach some uncongenial place in which it is 
starved or choked. Then farewell, a long farewell, 
to all its greatness! By degrees the parent plant 
becomes exhausted and dwindles away, while the 
scions which should have carried on the dynasty 
are hoped for in vain, and so some precious treasure 
is lost for ever. 

If plants have ambition, there is one vice 
closely allied to it which they do not possess. 
Jealousy is confined to animals. Men, dogs, cats 
and horses are jealous. There is no evidence to 
lead us to suppose that plants are afflicted with that 
horror of horrors. They may have their loves and 
their hatreds; they will, as we have seen, help one 
another, and they will strangle and murder one 
another. They will even rob one another; but the 
torture of jealousy seems to be unknown to them. 
They will attack their neighbors with the pitiless 
savagery of the old Rhineland robber knights. No 



238 Redesdale's Further Memories 

vampire could with more ruthless cruelty suck the 
blood of a fair maiden than certain malignant 
fungi, which fasten upon great trees and shrubs, 
and draw out the sap of their noble lives in order 
to nourish their own ignominious bodies. Then 
there are the saprophytes, plants as unlovely as 
their name, vegetable horrors, which, like the 
ghouls of the "Arabian Nights," are found feasting 
upon death and decay. Non ragionam di lor! Ma 
grada e passa. 

In the part of the world where I live the old 
thorn trees are, with the oaks, the glory of the 
countryside. One year, to my dismay, I saw that 
all my thorns in which I took so much pride were 
apparently dying. In the middle of summer their 
leaves withered and wilted, and they presented a 
piteous sight. I wrote to Kew for advice. Kew is 
a never-failing help in trouble. The answer came 
back: Have you any savin juniper bushes? If so, 
examine them. You will probably find them cov- 
ered with a yellow slimy sort of jelly, which is the 
first stage of a fungus which, in its second stage, 
fastens upon the thorn. The letter went on to ad- 
vise a merciless destruction and holocaust of the 
savin bushes, and prophesied that the fungus on the 
thorns would die and not renew itself, so that no 
permanent harm would ensue. Sure enough, in 
my ignorance, I had planted a number of bushes 
of savin, which I found, as Kew prophesied, to be 
covered with an ugly yellow mucilaginous sub- 



Verba Composita 239 

stance. My inquisition was followed by an auto 
da fe of the junipers; when their enemies were 
burnt, the thorns recovered and I had no more 
trouble. 

How most other plants hate the beech and the 
ash! How resolutely they refuse to grow under 
their shade ! And yet even the best hated men have 
their friends, who will smile to them and seek their 
company. Lords of beech woods wanting covert 
for their game should try planting Laurus Colchica 
and Laurus rotundi folia. The pheasants love their 
shelter, and they are quite happy even under old- 
established beeches. 

There are plants of prey just as there are beasts 
of prey and birds of prey. These are plants which 
live upon animal food just as we do, setting traps 
and snares for them with all the cunning shown by 
one of Richard Jen^enes' phenomenal gamekeepers 
or poachers. What, by the by, is the exact dividing 
line which separates the poacher from the keeper? 
Does the one develop into the other as does the 
chrysalis into the butterfly? I remember a little 
old Highland stalker, a veteran of the "hull," as 
brown and rugged as a russet apple; we had been 
watching deer a long way off all the morning — 
the wind wrong for a stalk — and he confided to 
me all those secrets of deer life which seemed as 
familiar to him as if, like the Buddha, he had been 
himself a stag in some previous stage of existence. 
"How long have you been a stalker, Hughie?" I 



240 Redesdale's Further Memories 

asked. "Maybe twenty years," he answered; but 
then, looking up, his eyes twinkling with a craft 
worthy of Autolycus, he added, "but I was a shep- 
herd for many years before that." 

There was a whole folio volume of predatory but 
illicit sport in the words. Some plants, like the 
various pitchers of Nepenthe and others, remain 
still and are content to rely upon the beauty of their 
colours to tempt the game to its doom. Caught in 
the trap, the victims are held tight by some glue 
like birdlime, or kept from finding their way out 
by fingers of sharp teeth like the knives of the Iron 
Virgin of Niirnberg. Others, innocent, humble 
little creatures, look "as if they would not hurt a 
fly." But let the fly beware, and keep out of their 
grip — "foxes in stealth, wolves in greediness," they 
are armed like the butter wort (pinguicula) with 
glands which become active at the touch, and 
secure the prisoner, or as the sundew (drosera), 
equipped with tentacles which close in upon him like 
a horror in one of Edgar Allan Poe's stories. How 
these creatures feed and how they digest their 
meat is told in Darwin's "Insectivorous Plants" 
and elsewhere. These are facts, not fancies. But 
what gastronome could take offence if he were 
accused of being as greedy as sundew ! 

There is one human quality, the power of enjoy- 
ment, which, above all others, we seem to recognize 
in our plants. It is impossible to look upon the 
daffodils in a field dancing in the sunlight of an 



Verba Composita 241 

early April day, without feeling that here is the 
very embodiment of gladness — of the joie de vivre; 
and as the months speed on and flower after flower 
bursts into life, meeting the renewed glories of the 
sun, we have before us a roundelay of gaiety and 
happiness which only quite ceases when the first 
grip of winter comes to choke and kill the melan- 
choly glory of autumn. Then, when the dahlias 
hang their stricken heads, and the blue clouds of 
the Michaelmas daisies fade and shed their seed, 
we are conscious of the fact that they, too, have 
their sorrows, though the tragedy of so many has 
passed unnoticed when rivals, each one more beau- 
tiful than the last, have been springing up to take 
their place. A greater than I am has noticed the 
pleasure that plants take in the act of living. A 
friend sends me these lines of Wordsworth's : 

"The budding twigs spread out their fan 

To catch the breezy air; 
And I must think, do all I can, 
That there was pleasure there." 

And so we linger on in our Veluvana until the 
sun is setting in the west. There is an end of light 
and heat for this day, and the plants, like the birds, 
must sleep and even dream, if Keats be right.* 
Theirs is perhaps not the sleep which we know, 
but nothing is more certain than the change which 

* "As when upon a tranced summer night 

Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, 
Tall oaks, branch-chained by the earnest stars, 

Dream, and so dream all night without a stir." 

Hyperion, I., 72. 



242 Redesdale's Further Memories 

they undergo in darkness. In some plants the 
leaflets curl downwards, in others upwards; in 
many the flowers close altogether, and are folded 
almost as they were when buds. But all green 
plants show one phenomenon. Whereas under light 
the leaves take up the air in the little mouths on 
the underside of their leaves, and after working up 
the carbonic-acid gas into carbon for the building 
of their stems and branches, return the rest in the 
shape of pure oxygen, purifying and sweetening the 
air; when night comes the process is reversed. 
Then they retain the oxygen and exhale carbonic- 
acid gas only, and that is why careful nurses, 
though they may not know the reason, turn plants 
out of a sick-room when the night comes on. It 
has been calculated that of those little stomates on 
the underside of a beech leaf, little kitchens or labo- 
ratories in which the tree prepares its food, there 
are no fewer than a million. Yes, the plants must 
sleep — all save certain disreputable night-blooms, 
which, like owls and bats and witches, hate the light 
and haunt the darkness. In a few hours the first 
glimmer of dawn will break ; the rosy-fingered god- 
dess will rouse her choir of birds, and they, with 
their morning hymn, will awaken the trees and the 
flowers ; the blessed dew will fall, distilling the sweet 
scents of woodland and gardenland, and the joy of 
the world and of the plants will spring into the birth 
of a day. 

If I were able to accept, as do the pious Budd- 



Verba Composita 243 

hists, the doctrine of rebirth and the transmigration 
of souls, I, noting what I have called the purposeful 
movements of plant-life, should be inclined to go 
a step further than they do. If a man may have 
been in a previous state of existence a stag, a mon- 
key, or a snake, why should he not equally have 
been a tree, a shrub, or a poisonous creeper? The 
stately dignity of the oak, the sweet virtues of the 
rose, the venomous juice of the deadly nightshade, 
are qualities which might be traced in many a rein- 
carnation. The image, at any rate, is found in 
Ezekiel: "Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in 
Lebanon with fair branches and with a shadowing 
shroud and of an high stature, and his top was 
among the thick boughs" (Ezekiel xxxi. 3). 

When all is said and done, is it so very foolish, 
as we sit wool-gathering and drinking in the sweet- 
ness of a summer's evening amid the fragrance of 
our Veluvana, to let our thoughts run riot among 
the many-coloured clouds of fancy, tracing some 
faint signs of kinship between the moods of men 
and the moods of plants? And if, in the indulgence 
of these whimsies, treating the search for knowl- 
edge, not as we English are supposed to take our 
pleasures — moult tristement — we should chance to 
strike some tiny spark of truth hitherto hidden 
from us, may we not call in Horace as counsel for 
the defence and ask: 

" ridentem dicere verum 

Quid vetat?" 



244 Redesdale's Further Memories 

Enshrined, as it were, in a temple of secular oaks, 
and other grave and reverend trees, there stands 
a small mulberry tree, very humble and inconspicu- 
ous, having hardly as yet reached the dignity of a 
shrub. In the late spring and early summer it is 
surrounded by flaming azaleas, white and deep 
purple lilacs, and other flowering Japanese maples, 
with their coral buds bursting into crimson leaves 
— all the "embroidery" of the Japanese forests, 
which look as if they had been planted to do honour 
to the little waif, the radiance of whose pedigree, 
indeed, outshines all their glory. It is like the beg- 
gar-maid at the African King Cophetua's court, 
but, like that humble maiden, worthy of royal 
favour above all the flaunting beauties who sur- 
rounded that "magnanimous and illustrate" mon- 
arch's throne; for that little tree, or tree that, by 
the grace of Pomona, shall yet be, is an undoubted 
scion of the tree which Shakespeare planted in the 
garden of the new home which he built for his pros- 
perous retirement at Stratford-on-Avon. The 
story is complete in all its details. It has been told 
by Malone in his life, and recently by Sir Sidney 
Lee in the admirable new edition of his life of the 
poet, and is confirmed by what Dr. Johnson told 
Boswell when they visited Mrs. Gastrell. 

In the year 1 597 Shakespeare, minded to end his 
days in his native town, as should become an Ar- 
miger of good means, bought New Place, which 
had been the most considerable house in Stratford ; 



Verba Composita 245 

but the buildings were in ruins, and the poet built 
himself a new house with three gables, the centre 
of which carried a shield with the spear, which he 
adopted as his coat-of-arms. "Shakespeare paid 
for it," writes Sir Sidney Lee, "with two gardens, 
the then substantial sum of sixty pounds. A curi- 
ous incident postponed legal possession. The ven- 
dor of the Stratford Manor House, William Under- 
bill, died suddenly of poison at another residence 
in the county — Fillowgley, near Coventry — and the 
legal transfer to the dramatist was left at the time 
incomplete. Underbill's eldest son Fulk died a 
minor at Warwick next year, and after his death 
he was proved to have murdered his father. The 
family estates were thus in danger of forfeiture, 
but they were suffered to pass to the felon's next 
brother Hercules, who, on coming of age in 1602, 
completed in a new deed the transfer of New 
Place to Shakespeare." Sir Sidney goes on to say 
that the poet does not appear to have permanently 
settled at New Place until 161 1. In the meantime, 
he had been busy rebuilding the house and planning 
his garden. And now for the history of the famous 
mulberry tree. 

Soon after his accession to the throne King James 
the First appears to have been fascinated by the 
idea of establishing the cultivation of silk in this 
country. There was a Frenchman, a native of 
Picardy, of the name of Forest, who, in the year 
1608, "kept greate store of English silk- worms 



246 Redesdale's Further Memories 

at Greenwich, the which the king, with great pleas- 
ure, came often to see them worke; and of their 
silke he caused a piece of taffeta to be made" (Ma- 
lone's "Life of Shakespeare"). This led to the 
King's planting many hundred thousand mulberry 
trees in this country, those destined for the Midland 
Counties being distributed by a Frenchman named 
Veron. But the King also planted a number of 
trees south of Hyde Park, at the western end of 
what now are Buckingham Palace Gardens. These 
trees gave the name to the famous "Mulberry Gar- 
dens," of which I shall say a word later. 

It seems that on his return from one of his annual 
excursions to London, Shakespeare brought back 
with him a young mulberry tree, and with his own 
hands planted it in his garden, in which tradition 
says that he loved to work. What more natural 
than that the courtier-actor, who was as much 
petted by King James as he had been in the pre- 
vious reign, should wish to enrich his Eden with a 
specimen of the latest botanical craze? After pass- 
ing through various hands, the house passed back to 
Sir Hugh Clopton, whose family had formerly 
possessed it. Sir Hugh pulled down Shakespeare's 
three-gabled and ugly house, and built one more 
suitable to his position, where, in May, 1742, Ma- 
lone tells us that he hospitably entertained Garrick, 
Macklin and Delane under the poet's own mulberry 
tree. In 1790 the father of Mr. Davenport's clerk, 
then ninety-five years old, told Malone that as a boy 



Verba Composita 247 

he lived in the next house to New Place, and that 
he had often eaten of the fruit of the tree, some 
branches of which overhung his father's garden; 
that it was planted by the poet, and the first mul- 
berry tree to be seen in the neighbourhood. 

In 1752 Henry Talbot, son-in-law and executor 
of Sir Hugh Clopton, sold New Place to a clergy- 
man of the name of Gastrell, a man of fortune and 
Vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire, apparently an ill- 
conditioned, quarrelsome man, who was soon in hot 
water with his neighbours. He had a dispute with 
the town over assessments, in which, by the by, he 
was utterly in the wrong, and he so resented the 
desire of sightseers to be admitted to view the fam- 
ous mulberry tree, that to spite them and the towns- 
folk he, in 1 758, cut down the tree, his wife urging 
him to the impious act, as Dr. Johnson told Bos- 
well. She, the Lady Macbeth of this "withered 
murder," was a daughter of Sir Thomas Aston and 
sister of Mrs. Walmesley, the wife of Johnson's 
first patron, and to the lovely Molly Aston, whose 
beauty so stirred the inflammable Dr. Johnson that 
the groves and woods of Staffordshire and Derby- 
shire rang with its praises sung by an elderly Tity- 
rus in a bush-wig. The grand old amorist never 
wearied of celebrating the charms of his lovely 
ladies. Even the Island of Skye was forced to re- 
sound with the perfections of his Thralia Dulcis 
in one of the worst Sapphic odes that ever brought 
wrath upon a fifth-form boy. 



248 Redesdale's Further Memories 

At last the vandal parson, irritated beyond 
measure by his own bilious spite, declared that the 
house should pay no more assessments, so he pulled 
it down and broke it up for sale of the building- 
materials. As Shakespeare's own house had been 
long since destroyed by Sir Hugh Clopton, that did 
not signify so much, but the murder of the sacred 
tree was another matter. We may be sure that 
when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth finally turned 
their backs upon Stratford, their departure was not 
bemoaned by their neighbours. 

Blessed are the enthusiasts. It is true that they 
are sometimes egregious bores, but they are never 
so bad as the iconoclasts, and they do much good in 
the world. Before the murder of the famous mul- 
berry tree Edward Capell, the Shakespearian com- 
mentator, whose work rather fell under the cruel 
lash of Dr. Johnson, had managed to secure a cut- 
ting of it, which he carried to Troston Hall, his 
place in Suffolk, and planted in his garden. There 
is no easier tree to propagate than the mulberry; 
in that respect, it is like the willow. Cut a branch 
of it and stick it in the ground, and when the spring 
comes it will begin to show signs of life. Lurking 
in mysterious hiding-places in the bark are myriads 
of tiny unsuspected buds, full of life and vigour, 
which in due season will send down little slender 
fibres till they reach the soil, whence they derive 
nourishment; in time the buds will burst their 
prison of bark, and before many years are passed 



Verba Composite 249 

a new tree will bear fruit. So Mr. Capell's cutting 
throve amazingly and gave birth to a little colony 
of offshoots. How or when I know not, Troston 
passed into the possession of Mr. Lofft, and he, 
when about to let the place and disperse his collec- 
tion of plants, wrote to Sir William Thiselton Dyer, 
October 6th, 1896, offering "some scions of Shakes- 
peare's tree" to Kew. I at once wrote, begging for 
one of those scions, that it might be planted in Buck- 
ingham Palace Gardens — the site of the old mul- 
berry plantation of King James. What more appro- 
priate home could be found for it? There still 
stands, by the by, in the Palace grounds a venerable 
mulberry tree which must be the one last relic of 
King James's attempt at silk-worm cultivation. 

The mulberry gardens were soon converted into 
a pleasure resort after the manner of the Vauxhall 
and Cremorne of my youth. Both Evelyn and 
Pepys mention them and give them the worst of 
characters. Evelyn calls them (May 10th, 1654), 
"the only place of refreshment about the town for 
persons of the best quality to be exceedingly cheated 
at, Cromwell and his partisans having shut up and 
seized on Spring Gardens, which till now had been 
the usual rendezvous for ladies and gallants at this 
season." Pepys, in his outspoken way, went fur- 
ther in his condemnation some years later. His 
spades were always spades — yet the sly old dog con- 
fessed to having amused himself greatly there. 
There is in especial a very characteristic account 



250 Redesdale's Further Memories 

of a dinner there, given by Mr. Sheres, at which 
Pepys was introduced to a Spanish Olio, "a very 
noble dish, such as I never saw better or any more 
of. This and the discourse he did give us of Spain, 
and description of the Escuriall, was a fine treat." 
The entertainment seems to have been managed 
with an eye to economy, for after dinner they all 
went off to Brentford, ordering the waiter to set 
on one side what had not been eaten, and they would 
come back and have it for supper. What would 
the head waiter at the "Ritz" or the "Carlton" say 
to such an order as that? But the evening was 
spoilt by the sudden indisposition of poor Mr. 
Sheres, the amphitryon of the Olio, probably the 
cause of the trouble — though Pepys appears to 
have returned to the "noble dish" with appetite, 
issuing unscathed from the temptation. 

Sir Charles Sedley, the profligate wit and bril- 
liant writer, of whom Charles the Second said that 
"Nature had given him a patent as Apollo's vice- 
roy," and that "his style, whether in writing or dis- 
course, would be the standard of the English 
tongue," wrote a play called the Mulberry Garden, 
which Pepys, a great playgoer and probably a good 
judge, damned with faint praise. The "Tribullus 
of his age," as Dryden dubbed him in his dedication 
to "The Assignation," for once had failed to score. 

The story of Shakespeare's mulberry has led me 
far astray, and when we get to Evelyn and Pepys 
it is difficult not to wander on. But I must curb 



Verba Composita 251 

my prolixity. I think I have said enough to show 
that the Troston plants have a pedigree which it 
would defy all the sagacity and learning of the 
College of Heralds to demolish. Kew, always gen- 
erous, has continued to propagate from them, and 
as Sir David Prain, the present director, writes to 
Sir Sidney Lee: "We have sent plants to places 
where there are memorials of Shakespeare, and to 
people interested in matters relating to him." It 
is to the kindness of Sir William Thiselton Dyer 
that I owe my special treasure. 

I do not know upon what authority is based the 
statement that the tree now growing in New Place 
is a scion of the old tree — probably it is. But, in 
any case, there are offshoots enough propagated by 
the pious care of Kew from the Troston stock to 
do away with any fear lest the dynasty should die 
out. 



CHAPTER IX 
Russia 

THE time which I spent in Russia in 1863-64 
was a transition period. Transition pe- 
riods in history are always difficult to 
describe, and still more difficult to explain. It is 
comparatively easy to tell the story of some great 
concrete fact, a world-encompassing war, a revo- 
lution, the upheaval of a dynasty ; but to set out the 
causes which, working during a period of exter- 
nally unruffled calm, are brewing the hell-broth ; to 
show the hidden powers which are silently operating 
under the surface to bring about a mighty change — 
that is a task before which even those who have the 
best information may well hesitate. 

Every skilled newspaper correspondent will, with- 
out much difficulty, write a brilliant description of 
an earthquake with all the harrowing and soul- 
stirring horrors of the upheaval ; but even the most 
experienced seismologist hardly dares to set on 
paper his estimate of the mysterious hidden forces, 
which, battling in the bowels of the earth, unseen 
and unsuspected, burst out in their wrath to wreak 
the tragedies of Lisbon or of Catania. So it is with 
transition periods in history. They are generally 

252 



Russia 253 

marked by peace and prosperity. There are often 
no outward signs to sound the alarm that there is 
trouble ahead. 

The political catastrophe, like the earthquake, 
comes without warning ; like the wrecking typhoon, 
it may be preceded by a dead calm. It will be said 
with justice that these violent similes do not fit the 
case of Russia. There has been no great epidemic 
of violence, no fierce upheaval like that of the 
French Revolution. Individual murders there have 
been. The pages of Russian history are stained by 
cruelty and murder, culminating in the barbarous 
tragedy of the death of the Emperor Alexander 
the Second ; but the changes which have taken place 
have been wrought without disturbing the atmos- 
phere of the world at large. None the less, the revo- 
lution here has been far-reaching. 

The Russia of to-day differs toto coelo from the 
Russia of a hundred years ago. Absolutism died 
with the Emperor Nicholas, and no Russian Tsar 
will ever again be able to rule, or even try to rule, 
without taking into account the will of his people. 
The relations between the sovereign and his sub- 
jects are for that- very reason happier than they 
ever were, and the events of the last two years 
have shown that loyalty has not perished because 
autocracy has given up the ghost. The strength of 
Holy Russia to-day, in the face of the German war 
of aggression, lies in the determined attitude of the 
people — in their pious love for their country, in 



254 Redesdale's Further Memories 

their almost fanatical belief in their Church, and in 
their veneration for the great White Tsar who is 
the head of that Church. 

The nineteenth century opened darkly enough 
for Russia. The Emperor Paul had been on the 
throne for four years — a gloomy, unhappy man, not 
without ability, not without the wish to do what 
was right, until his mind was unhinged by madness. 
The first acts of his reign were worthy of all praise. 
He showed kindly feeling, clemency, and even gene- 
rosity to the Poles, setting free those that had been 
imprisoned, and making ample provision for their 
heroic leader, Kosciusko. His edict enacting that 
the succession to the throne should be determined, 
not by the will or caprice of the reigning sovereign, 
but by a fixed and certain law of primogeniture, 
was a wise measure, calculated to save his country 
from the intrigues and bloodshed under which she 
had suffered so long. 

But the early days of his reign were embittered 
by the knowledge conveyed to him by his Vice- 
Chancellor, Count Bezbarooks, that it had been the 
intention of his mother, Catherine the Great, to 
exclude him from the succession in favour of his 
own son, Alexander. Apart from that, he was a 
haunted man. Haunted by the murder of his father, 
Peter the Third, knowing full well that if the hand 
was the hand of OrlorT , the dictating voice was the 
voice of his mother, Catherine. 

Haunted by suspicion, unable to trust any living 



Russia 255 

soul — if a curtain rustled, stirred by the wind, a 
murderer stood hidden beneath it; if two courtiers 
spoke in a whisper, it was a conspiracy; a cough 
was the signal to a confederate; once when the 
Empress was talking in a low voice to a foreign 
ambassador, he bade her speak up, saying: "You 
may be prepared to play the part of Catherine, but 
I would have you remember that in me you will 
not find a Peter the Third." A terrible speech, 
showing what he knew of the past, what he dreaded 
in the future! 

His wife, his ministers, his officers, were all under 
suspicion. He looked upon his court as a hotbed 
of treason, conspiracy and murder. It was not to 
be wondered at that in a brain so tortured, the seeds 
of hereditary madness should have been swift to 
germinate. Then came all those grotesquely savage 
edicts which could only be accounted for by insanity. 
The wearing of trousers, or of a round hat, were 
crimes to be punished by the knut ; short hair with- 
out pigtails constituted a criminal offence; ladies 
must stop their carriages and step out into the snow 
and mud to salute him when his sleigh or carriage 
came in sight. Three ladies who disobeyed the 
order — one of whom was hurrying to fetch a doctor 
to her dying husband — were seized by the police, 
carried off to the guard-house, stripped, shaved and 
whipped. It was clear that the man was as mad 
as Bedlam, but there were no Anticyrse for Tsars. 

Russia took the law into her own hands. A con- 



256 Redesdale's Further Memories 

spiracy was formed, with Count Peter Pahlen, Min- 
ister President and Military Governor of Peters- 
burg, at its head, to put an end to despotism — a 
cruel weapon in the hands of a lunatic. The con- 
spirators were men of the highest rank by birth and 
by virtue of office — Pahlen himself, prime minister 
and the trusted friend of his sovereign, who de- 
lighted in loading him with honors. In the night 
of the 24th of March they forced their way into the 
Michailow Palace, surprised the unhappy Emperor 
in his bedroom and strangled him with his own 
military sash. He fought with the demoniac fury 
of a madman, for he was of strong and muscular 
build, and it was no easy matter to overpower him. 
He tried to burst into the Empress's apartments, 
which adjoined his, but here his distrust of her 
proved his undoing — he had caused the door which 
led to her rooms to be hermetically fastened. His 
suspicions closed to him the one possibility of es- 
cape, the one refuge with the wife who would not 
have failed him in his sore need. 

Paul's foreign policy was feeble. He detested the 
French revolution, and yet threw himself into the 
arms of Napoleon; at other times he was prepared 
to flirt with England. The most noteworthy of his 
acts was the edict in regard to the succession to 
which I have alluded above. Its importance lay 
especially in the fact that it drove the first nail 
into the coffin of absolutism. It is evident that an 
"absolute" monarch, who has been deprived of his 



Russia 257 

omnipotence in any one particular, ceases ipso facto 
to be flawlessly absolute. Certainly, absolutism did 
not finally die till fifty-five years later. But a rift 
in the panoply of the Tsars had been made by the 
Emperor Paul. 

I heard much about the reign of the mad Tsar 
when I was at St. Petersburg in 1863. There, were 
still some old people who could talk about those 
days. Count Peter Pahlen had been long dead; 
after the murder he betook himself to his country 
place and disappeared from public life. But I had 
to represent my chief at the funeral of his brother, 
who commanded the cavalry against Napoleon in 
181 2, and with a still younger brother, Count 
Nicholas Pahlen, I was intimate in London for sev- 
eral years. Another link with that time was old 
Countess Rasumowski, who had been divorced and 
banished from the Court, but forgiven and taken 
into favour again by Paul. It was one of his acts 
of clemency. She was sister-in-law of Beethoven's 
friend to whom he dedicated the famous quartets. 
How old she was I know not, but she was a great 
figurehead in Russian society, and on her name-day 
all St. Petersburg, from the Emperor downwards, 
flocked to her house. I had to go, as my chief had 
a cold, and I represented him. The dear naughty 
old lady was sitting in state, dressed all in white 
like a bride, with a wreath of pink roses round her 
head. That and the rouge with which she had 
plastered her poor withered cheeks made her look 



258 Redesdale's Further Memories 

quite antediluvian. She must certainly have been 
near a hundred. The memory of Count Ribeau- 
pierre, who was Grand Maitre de la Cour, and with 
whom I was also acquainted, went even further 
back. He had been page of honour to the Empress 
Catherine, who died in 1 796. These are names only 
worth mentioning, in order to show that some of my 
impressions of the unhappy Tsar's reign were 
drawn at first-hand. 

Judging from the accounts given by the few old 
people who themselves remembered those times, and 
from the talk of younger men who had heard from 
their own fathers — perhaps actors in the crime — 
the whole history of that midnight murder, the out- 
rage did not arouse any excitement commensurate 
with the horror of the deed. Men had become cal- 
lous; they had grown used to seeing the rulers of 
the reigning dynasty disappear by violent or mys- 
terious deaths. What really would have startled 
them would have been to hear that a Tsar had died 
a peaceful death in his bed, for murder had come 
to be looked upon as the natural end of a Romanoff. 
On the morning of the 24th of March St. Peters- 
burg, awakened to the gruesome news of the night, 
heaved a sigh of relief, and went about its business. 
That business was the accession of a new Tsar. 

Alexander had been accused of being privy to his 
father's murder, but from all the evidence which 
I was able to gather, this was a calumny. There is 
no doubt that he was in touch with the conspirators, 



Russia 259 

and that he was a consenting party to his father's 
removal from the throne. Paul's state was such 
that not even a son could wish to see his father 
remain vested with the terrible power of the auto- 
crat of all the Russias. But murder, let alone parri- 
cide, was not in his nature. All the acts of his 
reign gave the lie to so hideous a charge. The man 
who set free the political exiles in Siberia, who 
abolished torture from the criminal code of his 
country, who made it illegal to hold sales of serfs, 
who helped to extend the blessings of education 
by founding universities, was a wise and humane 
ruler. Even the policy which made him countenance 
the conspiracy against his father was in the inter- 
ests of humanity. Had he known the extremity to 
which that plot was to be pushed, we may be sure 
that he would have fought rather than not inter- 
pose his authority. 

At the outset of his reign the young Emperor 
was hypnotized by the glamour of the fame of 
Napoleon, who was then First Consul and seemed 
to be destined for the dictatorship of the world. 
But that crime, and worse than crime, that mistake, 
as Talleyrand put it — the murder of the Due 
d'Enghien at Vincennes in March, 1804 — aroused 
the greatest indignation in the mind of Alexander, 
and the Russian charge d'affaires at Paris, was in- 
structed to express that feeling in no measured 
terms. The First Consul's reply was, in effect, a 
request that the Emperor would mind his own busi- 



260 Redesdale's Further Memories 

ness. A further note was sent, recapitulating the 
claims and remonstrances of Russia, and M. 
d'Ombril asked for his passports. 

The tragedy of Vincennes had provoked the 
anger of Alexander ; the coronation of Napoleon as 
Emperor by the Pope summoned from Rome to do 
his bidding, on the 19th of November in the same 
year, called up a totally different but no less hostile 
feeling. That a Corsican adventurer should robe 
himself in the Imperial purple and pretend to equal 
rank with himself, was something which the proud 
Romanoff could not brook. The disgust and indig- 
nation engendered by Napoleon's cruelty and pre- 
tensions were enhanced by his territorial encroach- 
ments. Alexander threw himself heart and soul 
into the combination against the French, and 
Europe was once more ablaze with war until the 
Peace of Tilsit in 1807, when on board a raft an- 
chored in the river Niemen, the two Emperors fell 
into one another's arms, kissed, and swore eternal 
friendship. 

It would be outside of the purview of my task 
to dwell upon this event were it not for the interest 
attaching to the secret treaty entered into upon that 
occasion, an instrument the conditions of which 
were not made public until the year 1834, Dut which 
so clearly illustrated the ambitions of both nations. 
Napoleon undertook that Russia should become pos- 
sessed of European Turkey, with Constantinople 
and the outlet into the Mediterannean, and pursue 



Russia 261 

her conquests in Asia as far as she chose, India 
being, of course, understood as the objective. 
France was to have Egypt, Malta, the assistance of 
the Russian fleet in the capture of Gibraltar — the 
navigation of the Mediterranean being confined to 
French, Russian, Spanish and Italian ships. There 
were other provisions and much detail, but the above 
were the chief points. The amusing feature of this 
still-born treaty was that neither party honestly 
meant business. Each thought that he was jockey- 
ing the other, with the firm intention of carrying 
out no more of it than was for his own advantage. 
Tomini, who was aide-de-camp to Napoleon,* wrote 
and told Paris that Alexander had been made to 
swallow a strong dose of opium, which would keep 
him quiet for some time, while Boutourlin told St. 
Petersburg that the terms of the treaty imposed 
such liabilities upon Russia that it must only be 
looked upon as a means of gaining time. 

Alexander was present at the meeting of the Ger- 
man princes called together by Napoleon at Erfurt 
in the following year. Napoleon had provided for 
the entertainment of what it would be irony to call 
his guests, by summoning from Paris the famous 
Talma with his troupe of actors. One of the plays 
chosen was Voltaire's (Edipe, and when the player 
came to the line : 

"L'amitie d'un grand homme est un bienfait des Dieux." 

♦Tomini later quarrelled with Napoleon and entered the service 
of Alexander. 



262 Redesdale's Further Memories 

the gigantic Russian Emperor leant over and the- 
atrically seizing Napoleon's hand, said, "J e n'ai 
jamais mieux senti!" The stage effect missed fire, 
for the great little friend was quietly dozing, and 
had to be aroused to consciousness of what was hap- 
pening. The "parterre de Rois," the "pit of 
Kings," smiled and applauded, but the demonstra- 
tion was a fiasco. 

The "bienfait des Dieux" was not long lived. In 
four short years after the meeting at Erfurt Na- 
poleon made the greatest mistake of his life. He 
was at Moscow, and there we may leave him, stand- 
ing on the Sparrow Hill in his favourite attitude, 
his arms folded, his brows bent, looking upon the 
barbaric splendour of the fantastic pink towers and 
battlements of the Kremlin, waiting for the de- 
livery of the keys of the citadel — the keys which 
never came. 

The mystery of the burning of Moscow will never 
be cleared up. Was the city fired by Rostopchin? 
Did he even connive at the deed? He himself de- 
nied it in a pamphlet published at Paris in 1823, 
but in my day nobody with whom I spoke on the 
subject believed him. The general opinion was that 
this great act of patriotism, which was the begin- 
ning of Napoleon's downfall, was indeed his work. 
He burnt his own country house and destroyed his 
property, so that nothing should fall into the hands 
of the enemy — what more consistent than that he 
should deprive them of all supplies and all commu- 



Russia 263 

nication by burning the sacred capital after remov- 
ing as many of its inhabitants as was possible. I 
have called the fire an act of patriotism. I ought to 
have said Russian patriotism. The attachment of 
the Russian to the soil is something sacred. The 
Mujik has two religions — the religion of God and 
the religion of the soil. Holy Russia is to him not 
a mere jingle of words, and Rostopchin, when he 
punished the sacrilege of the invader, knew that he 
could count upon having with him the most sacred 
feelings of his fellow-countrymen. He was, indeed, 
the typical Russian of his time. The placard which 
he put on the village church, the only building on 
the property which he left standing, is charac- 
teristic : 

"For eight years I have been embellishing this 
place, and I have lived here happily in the bosom of 
my family. At your approach the seventeen hun- 
dred and twenty inhabitants of this property are 
leaving it, and I set fire to my house that it may not 
be polluted by your presence. Frenchmen! I have 
left you my two houses in Moscow, with their con- 
tents worth half a million roubles; here you will 
find nothing but ashes." 

This, of a surety, was a brave, a determined and 
patriotic man — a true Russian. He had been a 
great favourite of the Emperor Paul, and by his 
sage advice saved that unhappy man from many 
follies. It was said that had he been at St. Peters- 



264 Redesdale's Further Memories 

burg on the fatal 24th of March, 1801, the murder 
might not have been committed. During the early 
years of Alexander's reign Rostopchin was out of 
favour. But there came a time when the Emperor 
became aware of his worth and courage, and made 
him Lord Chamberlain and Governor of Moscow. 
He was a descendant of the great Mongol warrior 
of the twelfth century, Genghis Khan, and so he 
described himself in the following lines : 

"Je suis ne Tatare, 
Je voulais etre Romain. 
Les Fran?ais m'ont fait barbare, 
Et les Russes Georges Dandin." 

There is an excellent article on Rostopchin in the 
"Biographie Generale, " the book that Carlyle used 
to prize so highly. 

The Emperor Alexander the First died in 1825 
in circumstances which gave rise to some suspicion. 
He had left St. Petersburg in the month of Decem- 
ber, with the Empress, who was ailing, his object 
being to take her to a warmer climate. He seems 
to have been for some time depressed and haunted 
by the sinister idea that his death was not far off . 
He was always more or less dominated by the spell 
of mysticism, and, indeed, it was under the influ- 
ence of a mystic, a certain Madame de Kriidener, 
that he was induced to found the Holy Alliance. 
Before leaving St. Petersburg it is said that he went 
to the Church of the Convent of St. Alexander 
Nevski and caused a funeral service to be read. As 



Russia 265 

he left the town he stopped his carriage to cast a 
last yearning look upon the city where he had been 
born and which he loved so well. He left the Em- 
press at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, and went 
to the Crimea, where he caught a fever, hurried 
back to Taganrog and died, not before he was made 
aware of the discovery of a plot to murder him and 
the whole Imperial Family. 

It is difficult to understand why any Russian 
should have wished his death. Educated as he had 
been by his Swiss tutor, the famous La Harpe, in 
the most liberal principles, in his domestic policy he 
devoted himself heart and soul to the good of his 
people. Early in his reign he abolished serfdom in 
Esthonia, Livonia and Kurland. He introduced re- 
forms into the older universities and created new 
ones. He promoted the study of science, and gave 
his active patronage to all the educational institu- 
tions in the Empire. He did away with the so-called 
Secret Tribunal, a sort of Star Chamber, for the 
arbitrary trial of political offences. Commerce and 
industry were special objects of his care. He built 
new harbours and made roads, and in 181 8 extended 
to the peasants the right of establishing manufac- 
tories and commercial undertakings, a privilege 
which up to his time had been confined to the upper 
classes. 

If, later in his reign, he seemed rather inclined 
to go back upon these liberal principles, it must be 
ascribed to the poor and unsympathetic return with 



266 Redesdale's Further Memories 

which his endeavours were met. The country was 
hardly ripe for his audacious programme — cer- 
tainly not for parliamentary government, which at 
one time he had in view. His own wish was to sub- 
stitute a constitution for the absolutism which had 
existed up to his day. He was before his time. 
Napoleon might sneer at his duplicity and call him 
"un Grec du bas Empire," but he recognized his 
talent and his capacity for governing. The vast 
majority of his people adored the handsome giant, 
but treachery and treason were plotting under- 
ground, and rebellion broke out, as we shall see, 
as soon as his soul had left his body. That sorrow 
he was mercifully spared, though the knowledge 
that it was coming arrived to embitter his last days. 

The Emperor Nicholas came to the throne at a 
moment when a political storm of the greatest vio- 
lence was ready to burst. More than one division 
of the army was known to have been tampered 
with and to be disaffected, and many of the chief 
nobles were conspiring for a constitutional govern- 
ment. The warning — or was it more than a warn- 
ing? — received by the dead Emperor was sufficient 
to prove this, and there were at that moment special 
circumstances in the succession to the throne which 
were markedly favourable to revolution. 

Alexander, deeply imbued, as I have said, with 
mysticism, had a foreboding that he would not be 
long-lived. He deposited with the Council of the 
Empire a packet, the seals of which were not to be 



Russia 267 

broken without his command except in the event of 
his death, in which case it was to be opened at once 
and acted upon forthwith. As he died without 
issue, the Imperial Crown would, in accordance 
with the law of succession fixed by his father Paul, 
devolve upon his next brother, Constantine. He, 
however, was unwilling to reign. He preferred to 
remain as he was, governor and practically sov- 
ereign of Poland. Tsar of all the Russias he would 
not be. The mysterious packet was found to con- 
tain a letter from him, renouncing his claim to the 
throne in favour of his younger brother Nicholas. 

As soon as this was known, Nicholas most scru- 
pulously did all in his power to induce his brother 
to alter his determination. He even went so far 
as to proclaim Constantine Emperor. The latter, 
however, in spite of repeated appeals from his 
brother, held to his fixed purpose, and Nicholas be- 
came Emperor against his own will and endeavours. 

The conspirators found in these difficulties a rare 
opportunity for the attempt to carry out their plans. 
The interregnum had lasted fifteen days, and it was 
not till the 24th of December that Nicholas took 
possession of the Imperial Palace. On the 25th of 
December he read to the council the final renun- 
ciation of the Crown by Constantine, and on the 
following day he was proclaimed Emperor. That 
day the conspirators and the rebels assembled in 
the huge square — the Isaac Place — and shouted for 
Constantine and 'his bride, the Constitution," the 



268 Redesale's Further Memories 

soldiers believing in their innocence that "Consti- 
tution" was the name of the Grand Duke's real 
wife. Nicholas, unarmed, but attended by General 
Milarodowitch, the Governor of St. Petersburg, 
and a battalion of faithful grenadiers, and accom- 
panied by M. de la Ferronays, the French Ambas- 
sador, left the Palace and faced the rebels. The 
general, who was greatly beloved by the whole 
army, went forward and tried to speak with them, 
but he was at once bayoneted and shot. 

The new Emperor showed the greatest courage 
and patience, and it was not until near nightfall 
that, the rebels having fired the first shot, he or- 
dered his artillery to put an end to the trouble. 
Some two hundred men were killed by grape and 
canister. The five ringleaders were taken prison- 
ers, tried and hanged some months later. One of 
the Princes Troubetzkoi, who had been foremost 
in his threats against the Emperor's life, being sent 
for by the Tsar, threw himself at his feet and im- 
plored his pardon. "Sit down," said Nicholas, "and 
write to your wife at my dictation." The Prince 
sat down and the Tsar dictated : "My life is spared." 
The Prince was so overcome that he could write 
no more. "Now seal your letter and go," said the 
Tsar ; "take your life, and spend it in remorse and 
repentance." 

The remainder of the conspirators, men of 
noble family, were sent to Siberia — so many of 
them as were still alive were pardoned and set free 



Russia 269 

by that generous and noble sovereign, Alexander 
the Second, on his accession to the throne thirty 
years later. With the Dekabrists, the "men of De- 
cember," as they were called, the cry for Constan- 
tine was a mere pretext — the seizing of a possible 
chance. The real object was the abolition of 
Royalty and the proclaiming of a constitution. 
Nicholas has sometimes been accused of taking too 
stern measures against the Dekabrists. With that 
judgment I cannot agree. He was attacked with 
armed force, his murder and that of his whole fam- 
ily being the object; he did not strike the first blow. 
He could not expect to quell a formidable revolution 
in the army with rose-water. It was no sudden, 
passionate outburst of a people aching under the 
sense of wrong. The murderous plot, long medi- 
tated and carefully prepared, had been executed in 
cold blood. His brother lay dead at Taganrog. He 
and his dearly-loved boy, whom he had left en- 
trusted to sure hands in the palace, were to have 
been the next victims. The whole conspiracy lay 
revealed as in an open book. It was all the more 
dangerous in that it was not a mob riot, but a 
conspiracy of men of high birth, education and 
position, corrupting the army itself. Put your- 
selves in his place. That he was horror-stricken 
at the massacre was proved by the pathetic cry 
which he uttered to M. de la Ferronays, the French 
Ambassador, who never left his side throughout 
that cruel day: "Ah! quel commencement de 



270 Redesdale's Further Memories 

regne." It was to him the skeleton at the feast 
throughout his life. 

Shortly after his accession to the throne the Duke 
of Wellington was sent to Russia as special ambas- 
sador, nominally to congratulate him, but also with 
the object of inducing the new Tsar to adopt a con- 
ciliatory attitude towards the Sultan, between 
whom and the Greeks there was much trouble. The 
irony of Fate made the Duke take with him as 
Secretary of Embassay, Lord Fitzroy Somerset 
(Lord Raglan), the general whose victories twenty- 
nine years later in the defence of Turkey were to 
break the proud heart of that same Tsar. It was 
during these negotiations that Nicholas formed his 
estimate of the Duke's character, and caused him 
to cherish in his heart the memory of the great 
soldier as of a model to be copied. It was then, too, 
that he first declared that he had no higher ambition 
than to be a "gentleman," using the English word ; 
and whatever may have been his faults, whatever 
his ambition, a truthful, honest gentleman he re- 
mained to his life's end. To the Duke of Welling- 
ton he made no secret of his determination to allow 
no foreign Power, or Powers, to interfere between 
himself and the Porte. That was his lifelong con- 
sistent policy. If Nicholas was reactionary, if he 
hated education and opposed the spread of science, 
if he strained the powers of absolutism almost to 
the breaking point, he did so openly, and it was the 



Russia 271 

tragedy of his accession which poisoned his many 
fine qualities. 

During his reign the ship of State was seldom 
in smooth waters. He sent Prince Mentschikoff to 
Persia to announce his accession to the throne, 
with instructions to enter into negotiations for the 
settlement of the frontier questions which were in 
dispute. If the maintenance of peace be the proper 
aim of diplomacy, Mentschikoff was not a success- 
ful ambassador. His mission to Persia ended in 
war, as did his embassy to Turkey more than a quar- 
ter of a century later. The Russians, under Prince 
Paskiewitch, were victorious, and the province of 
Erivan was added to Russia. 

Poland was the chief thorn in his side in 1828; 
two years after his coronation at Moscow he caused 
himself to be crowned King of Poland at Warsaw. 
The ceremonial was gorgeous, and the King- 
Emperor, invoking the Supreme Majesty of 
Heaven, prayed that he might govern for the happi- 
ness of his people. He also wrote to the Pope, 
thanking His Holiness for the reception given to 
the Tsarevitch, promising to "protect the well-being 
of his Catholic subjects respecting their convic- 
tions," etc. That he was sincere in these under- 
takings admits of little doubt. Unfortunately he 
was represented at Warsaw by his brother Con- 
stantine, who, as his elder, and as having renounced 
the throne in his favour, had more influence than 
an ordinary governor would have had. The revo- 



272 Redesdale's Further Memories 

tion in Poland broke out in 1830, and Prince San- 
guszko, the head of one of the noblest families in 
the country, people whom I afterwards knew, was 
one of the leaders. He was taken prisoner and 
degraded, and his estates were forfeited. It was 
said that when he was sent to Siberia, the Em- 
peror, with his own hand, wrote that the journey- 
was to be made on foot. When I was in Russia 
many years later, I had reason to believe that this 
was not true. The troubles in Poland lasted for 
many years — indeed, were never extinguished — 
and they led to gross exaggerations. 

I was in Paris as a small boy in 1845, an d I well 
remember hearing all the horrors that were hawked 
about there, and all the stories of cruelty. Espec- 
ially I recollect one day how when certain news 
came to one of the Prince de la Moskowa's concerts 
— he was the son of Marshal Ney and an accom- 
plished musician and conductor — the pious Roman 
Catholics present lashed themselves into a fury of 
emotion over the sufferings of the nuns of St. Basil. 
It was affirmed that they had been stripped naked, 
flogged and tortured, and that when they were 
starving and begged for food their mouths were 
filled with earthworms. Those were the lies by 
which the indignation of their co-religionists was 
aroused by Polish agents. The best informed peo- 
ple did not believe them. That the Poles were 
cruelly treated, and harshly misgoverned, was cer- 
tainly to be laid to the charge of the Grand Duke 



Russia 273 

Constantine. He had inherited the still-living 
hatreds and the memory of Moscow in the begin- 
ning of the seventeenth century. There were old 
scores to be settled, and his doctrine was an eye 
for an eye, the lex talionis in its greatest rigidity. 
It would have been a hard matter in any case for 
the Tsar to bring Russia and Poland into harmony. 
With Constantine at Warsaw it was impossible — 
yet the Grand Duke had married a Polish lady. 

The affairs of Poland were an apple of discord 
between France and Russia. The military suc- 
cesses of Nicholas were really confined to the Per- 
sian campaign, for although in his subsequent 
operations on the Danube in 1828 (poor Wallachia 
and Moldavia), his troops had some success, and 
even took Varna, the expedition served no great 
purpose, while it effectually showed the Tsar's in- 
capacity as a leader, for having taken the field in 
person, he had to return to St. Petersburg a pro- 
nounced failure — recognized as such by his own 
generals. 

A civil triumph was the codification of the Rus- 
sian law, begun in 1827 and finished in 1846, by 
which the peasants greatly benefited; was the 
chief feat in internal administration by which his 
reign was distinguished. 

In 1844 the Emperor Nicholas came to England 
and visited Queen Victoria at Windsor. The object 
of his visit was twofold. The Queen had received 
Louis Philippe, whom he hated and despised, and 



274 Redesdale's Further Memories 

he was determined to see whether he could not 
counteract the wily old King's influence. Secondly, 
the Convention of London of 1841 placed the Otto- 
man dominions under the protection of the Powers, 
and this manifestly did not suit the Tsar's book. 
He had his own views as to the Sublime Porte, and 
would brook no interference between himself and 
the Sultan, whose Christian subjects he wished to 
place under his own shield. That was for him a 
principle of religion. It was a momentous visit, 
destined to bear bitter fruit ten years later. 

Sir Robert Peel was at this time Prime Minister, 
and Lord Aberdeen Secretary of State for Foreign 
Affairs. It was only natural that the Foreign Sec- 
retary should have much conversation with his 
Sovereign's illustrious guest, and Lord Aberdeen 
was, by his gentle and conciliatory manners, the 
man, above all others, fitted to charm the Tsar, who 
to the last retained an affectionate admiration for 
him. Perhaps Lord Aberdeen's deportment to- 
wards the Emperor was a little too deferential; at 
any rate, he left Nicholas convinced that the Rus- 
sian views as to Turkey were shared by the British 
Government, and it was with unfeigned joy that in 
1852 the Emperor learnt of the accession to power 
as Prime Minister of a man whom he flattered him- 
self that he had talked over to his way of thinking, 
and whose peace-loving disposition would never 
allow him to go to war on behalf of the autonomy 
of Turkey. That he honestly believed that he had 



Russia 275 

had such an assurance from Lord Aberdeen cannot 
be doubted. 

In its main features the story of the Crimean 
War will never be forgotten. The storming of the 
heights of the Alma, which Nicholas believed to be 
impregnable, the beating back of the tidal wave 
of Russian infantry at Inkermann, when my old 
friend, Billy Hewitt, ordered to spike his guns and 
retire, answered, "Spike be damned!" and went on 
firing till they were red hot and the enemy were 
in retreat — just one gallant deed among many of 
that bloody battle; above all, the heroic charge of 
the six hundred at Balaclava, are feats of arms 
which must set men on fire as long as they have 
pulses to quicken. But how many men are there 
nowadays who could give any account of the causes 
which led to the war? 

The quarrels between the monks of the Greek 
and Latin churches in Palestine seem trivial 
enough reason to have started so great a catas- 
trophe. The custody of the key of the Church of 
the Nativity at Bethlehem, the right to worship in 
the Church of the Virgin near the Garden of Geth- 
semane, and the custody of the Sanctuaries of Jeru- 
salem, were the first pretexts of hostilities. That 
there was in the mind of the Emperor Nicholas a 
far wider-reaching motive, hardly suspected per- 
haps even by himself, will be seen presently. 

In the year 1740 a treaty concluded between 
Louis XV. and the Porte, practically gave the care 



276 Redesdale's Further Memories 

of the Sacred Places to the Latin Church. To the 
Greeks certain similar concessions had been made 
later on by firmans, or edicts of the Sultan, which, 
however, could not technically be held to over-ride 
the solemn treaty with France. Louis Napoleon 
took up the cause of the Latins, and his ambassador, 
M. de Lavalette, insisted with some violence on 
the exclusive rights of the Latin monks. The 
French people at large probably cared little for 
these squabbles between the rival creeds. But to 
Louis Napoleon they furnished an opportunity for 
securing to himself, as Defender of the Faith, a 
powerful friend in the Church. He wished to arro- 
gate for himself those sacred rights of primogeni- 
ture which had been the pride of the Kings of 
France. It was, moreover, an outlet for that 
feverish activity which his home policy had made 
a necessity for him. In the month of December, 
1852, a silver star, graven with the arms of France, 
was deposited in the church at Bethlehem with 
much pompous ceremonial, attended by the Turkish 
officials, and the Latin Patriarch with triumphant 
joy received the coveted keys of the church and 
Holy Manger. 

The fury of the Tsar was terrible. The insult 
to his Church, which he loved, and the affront to 
himself, were enhanced by the source from which 
they came. He had a special horror of all revolu- 
tions, pursued to his dying day by the nightmare 
of the conspiracy of December, 1825, the tragedy 



Russia 277 

which had inaugurated his reign. The revolutions 
of France were odious to him. Never would he, 
in the fullest sense, accept either Louis Philippe or 
Louis Napoleon as sovereigns equal to himself. 
Neither of them would he address as "Monsieur 
mon frere." 

And now behold an upstart who was buffeting 
and opposing him in what he looked upon as the 
most sacred of his Imperial duties as head of the 
Church ! The spiritual ambitions of the Tsars were 
hereditary. His father, the Emperor Paul, had 
been anxious even to don the priestly robes and 
celebrate the mass; but his wise and brave friend 
Rostopchin stopped him with a clever conceit. 
"Sire," said he, "you have no rights as priest. A 
priest must only marry once; you have been mar- 
ried twice — you cannot be a priest." The mad 
Emperor was convinced and refrained. 

On another occasion the Metropolitan boldly 
stopped him when he tried to enter the Holy of 
Holies. Although not a priest, the Russian Tsar 
is head of his Church, much as the English King 
is the head of ours, and Nicholas took the position 
very seriously. It was, moreover, intolerable to 
him that the firmans which had been wrung from 
the Porte in favour of the Orthodox monks should 
be set aside as mere scraps of paper, on account of 
the more binding powers of a treaty, musty with 
age, extorted more than a century previously by 
French chicane from an unwilling or callous Sultan. 



278 Redesdale's Further Memories 

He was determined to resist, and Prince Mentschi- 
koff was sent on a special embassy to Constantinople 
to demand compliance with the Russian claims on 
behalf of the Greek Church. 

Deeply religious and full of zeal for his Church, 
Nicholas was animated by the same spirit which 
spurred on the old Crusaders to face dangers and 
hardships of which we in these days of easy 
transport can have no idea, in order to wrest from 
the Moslem those very shrines for the guardianship 
of which he was striving. No one can doubt that 
he was honest and sincere in his pious aims. But 
there was something more. How could he divest 
himself of the hereditary ambition of Russia? It 
is true that in his conversations with Sir Hamilton 
Seymour he spoke only of the occupation, as dis- 
tinct from the seizure, of Constantinople; but if 
he once succeeded in establishing himself there in 
the guise of protector of the Greek Church through- 
out the Sultan's dominions, would his people ever 
allow him to give up the city upon which the covet- 
ous eyes of all the Russians had so long been fixed ? 
Would he even be willing to do so himself? Only 
think what it meant: the Black Sea changed from 
the position of an inland lake; access to the Medi- 
terranean through the straits of the Bosphorus and 
the Dardanelles; the potentiality of a huge navy 
ready to dart out upon the world from hidden and 
unapproachable harbours; a strategic base from 
which to attack all the maritime Powers of Europe. 




THE EMPEROR NICOLAS I 
From a lithograph 



Russia 279 

The temptation would be great indeed. Kinglake 
summed up the position in a striking and eloquent 
passage : 

"The strife of the Church was no fable, but, after 
all, though near and distinct, it was only the lesser 
truth. A crowd of monks, with bare foreheads, 
stood quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a 
church in Palestine; but beyond and above, tower- 
ing high in the misty North, men saw the ambition 
of the Tsars." 

It is not the first time in history that religion has 
been made to subserve the needs of politics. Martin 
Luther was spiritually sincere in his attack upon 
the clerical abuses of the Roman Catholic Church; 
but the success of the movement was due to the 
adhesion of the semi-barbarous German princes, 
who cared little for religion, but caught eagerly at 
the chance of shaking off the temporal yoke of 
Rome in their states. So it was in this case. 
Nicholas was no doubt honestly eager to establish 
among the Sacred Places of Palestine the suprem- 
acy of the Church that he loved; but he knew full 
well that even the most agnostic of his Boyarin 
would be ready to draw the sword if Constantinople 
was the prize dangled before his eyes. 

One man, the most considerable personage in the 
Empire after the Tsar himself, cared but little for 
the religious side of the contention. That man was 
Count Nesselrode, the Chancellor. The squabbles 
between the Greek and Latin monks interested him 



280 Redesdale's Further Memories 

in no way, for he belonged to neither faith. Curi- 
ously enough, he was a member of the Church of 
England, having, in December, 1780, been baptized 
in the Bay of Biscay on board an English man-of- 
war which had given hospitality to his parents, his 
father being at the time Russian Minister at Lis- 
bon ; and in our communion he gratefully remained 
till his death, continuing from time to time, as occa- 
sion served, never less than once a year, as I have 
been assured, to attend the services of the English 
Church. However indifferent he might be to the 
claims of Orthodoxy, he had, nevertheless, to obey 
the dictates of his Imperial — and imperious — mas- 
ter; and, of course, to him, as to every Russian, 
Constantinople was an irresistible lure; still, there 
is no doubt that his attitude in regard to the war 
was but lukewarm. He would have avoided it had 
it been possible. 

The historic embassy of Prince Mentschikoff 
showed the Tsar's hand. The matter at issue was 
no longer one confined to the custody of a key, how- 
ever sacred, or to the position of the feet on a 
crucifix. In the Greek crucifix the feet are nailed 
separately ; in the Latin crucifix the feet are crossed. 
The Greek crucifix in the church at Gethsemane 
was one of the matters in dispute. The Latin 
monks claimed that the crucifix of the Greeks 
should give place to one with the feet crossed; but 
these became minor questions when, in the most 
arbitrary fashion, the prince demanded that the 



Russia 281 

whole of the Christian subjects of the Sultan should 
be placed under the protectorate of the Tsar. 
What this meant will be understood when we re- 
member that it was computed that there were some 
thirteen millions of these out of a total of thirty- 
six millions of people, and thus over something 
approaching a third of the Sultan's subjects the 
Tsar was to be King. The Porte, well advised by- 
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, peremptorily refused. 
The Turk was ready to make some concession as re- 
garded the Holy Places, but he would not renounce 
his sovereignty over any portion of his people. 
Foiled at every step, Prince Mentschikoff left Con- 
stantinople, and the Tsar had once more to see him- 
self outwitted and bested by his old enemy, Lord 
Stratford. 

Lord Stratford de Redcliffe has often been ac- 
cused of having been the cause of the Crimean 
War, that great calamity in which, as Lord Salis- 
bury said many years afterwards, "we backed the 
wrong horse." Nothing could be more false than 
this charge laid against Lord Stratford, and yet 
probably nineteen out of every twenty Englishmen, 
imperfectly instructed as usual in foreign affairs, 
believe it to this day. The man really responsible 
for the war was the French Emperor, who, as so 
often happened during the nineteen years of his 
reign, was in sore need of the counter-irritant of 
a foreign war to calm the fever of his own subjects 
at home. Never was it more needful to him than 



282 Redesdale's Further Memories 

at the moment when the affairs of Turkey and the 
religious demands of the Emperor Nicholas began 
to be discussed in the chanceries of Europe. 

Frenchmen, and, above all, Parisians (do not 
forget the old saying, "Paris c'est la France"), 
were still under the terrible impression of the mas- 
sacres of the coup d'etat of the 2nd to the 4th of 
December, 185 1. Nothing could better serve the 
purpose of allaying the smouldering indignation 
than such a war as that which he saw he could 
foment, especially if it were carried on in concert 
with England. Such an alliance would immeasur- 
ably increase his prestige both at home and abroad, 
and, if he could arrange a visit to Queen Victoria, 
for which he was intriguing, would almost make it 
appear as if she approved or, at any rate, condoned 
the wholesale murders of 1851. 

As a matter of fact, at the very moment when 
Lord Stratford was striving with all his might to 
save England from war, he received instructions 
from home directing him to order the English fleet 
to go to Constantinople in company with the 
French. This was in obedience to the French Em- 
peror, who seemed to have dominated the British 
Government. Peace did not suit his plans; war 
did. From that moment Lord Stratford's en- 
deavours were frustrated ; war was inevitable. 

In the meantime the angry Tsar had sent his 
army to occupy for the second time Moldavia and 
Wallachia, those unhappy provinces, the Danubian 



Russia 283 

Principalities, as they were then called, upon which 
the curse of Cain seemed to have settled for all 
time. 

Those who have watched the landing of a crowd 
of Russian pilgrims at Jaffa will realize the power 
which Nicholas had at his back in the execution of 
his policy of fighting for the Holy Shrines. I have 
seen the old people, men and women, the tears 
streaming from their poor tired eyes, fall down 
upon their knees, to kiss the soil, the treading of 
which was the reward of long lives of grinding 
labour, privation and parsimony. I have seen an 
old peasant, with matted hair and beard, meanly 
wrapped in a sheepskin robe, sobbing out his patient 
heart in an ecstasy of grief at the Holy Sepulchre. 
In order to save up the money for this pious errand 
they must stint themselves, they must almost starve 
themselves, laying up kopeck by kopeck, looking 
with surety for their reward in another, a better 
and a less grinding life. The Church has promised 
it, and God will fulfil the promises of His Church. 

Half a century and more has slipped away since 
I left Russia, and I should have great hesitation in 
writing down my impressions of the intensely re- 
ligious character of the Russian people were it not 
that recent writings by well qualified observers 
show that those long years have wrought little 
change. Mr. Stephen Graham's book, "The Way 
of Martha and the Way of Mary," is a most charm- 
ing and sympathetic study of the complex psycho- 



284 Redesdale's Further Memories 

logical question of the religion of the Russian. 
Indeed, the only fault with which it can be charged 
is that the writer is almost too enthusiastic — more 
Orthodox than the Patriarch. I call it a complex 
question because it is so difficult to say how far it 
is pure religion and how far it is only mysticism, 
but, be it religion or be it mysticism, it is deeply 
ingrained in the soul of the Russian mujik; it is 
part of himself, and is revealed in a veneration for 
which I have found no parallel elsewhere. But 
the strange part about it is its powerlessness for 
restraint from sin. The greatest criminal will obey 
the harassing prescriptions of his Church as though 
his very life depended upon it. In Lent he will 
submit to a fast which is nothing short of cruel; 
even the Mohammedans' fast in the month of 
Ramadan is nothing to it, for when sunset comes 
the pious Moslem is free to feast as he pleases. 
With streaming eyes, in a frenzy of religious rap- 
ture, the Orthodox peasant will adore the sacred 
shrines and cross himself before the ikon, the 
blessed picture of his patron saint. But that is all. 
Piety and virtue are two things. The old Budotch- 
nik (night-watchman), who had his hut upon the 
frozen Neva, would cut a hole in the ice, into which 
he might throw the body of the wayfarer whom he 
had murdered, to be carried down to the Baltic; 
but in the Budotchka (his wooden hovel) a lamp 
always burned before the blessed ikon, in the pres- 
ence of which he would count his unholy spoil. 



Russia 285 

The toper, reeling with the fumes of vodka, before 
the days of that brave abstinence law of the present 
Tsar, would never be so drunk as to forget the 
marks of obeisance due to the sacred image, whose 
presence he would not hesitate to pollute by any 
crime. When Nicholas raised the fiery cross of a 
holy war, he could count upon the fierce valour of 
an army of fanatics. Death for his religion and 
for the soil of Holy Russia opens to the Russian 
the gates of Paradise. 

If the religious fanaticism of the people and the 
ambition of the governing classes was great in 
Russia, here in England the political frenzy was no 
less violent. For reasons which they would prob- 
ably have found it difficult to explain, the people 
took up the cause of the Turk with the wildest 
enthusiasm, and the shibboleth, "Balance of 
Power," was continually in the mouths of men who 
were quite ignorant of its meaning. In France the 
desire for war was, as I have hinted, confined to 
the Emperor and his surroundings; but it was a 
sad disillusion for the Tsar when he saw the tem- 
per of England and of the Government of his friend 
Lord Aberdeen, a temper which that lover of peace 
was powerless to resist, the man whom, when he 
was at Windsor in 1844, he believed himself to have 
talked over to his views. Trusting to his conver- 
sations with the then Foreign Secretary, the Tsar 
was firmly convinced that England would not go 
to war, in spite of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 



286 Redesdale's Further Memories 

whom he hated more than ever for his defeat of 
Mentschikoff, in spite of Lord Clarendon, and in 
spite of the fact that at the Colonial Office there 
was a Minister called Palmerston, who, more than 
any other man, reflected the spirit of his country- 
men, and who, by no great stretch of the imagina- 
tion, might be supposed to have some little influ- 
ence in foreign affairs. 

During his whole life the chief hobby of the 
Tsar had been his army. To increase its numbers, 
its smartness, and its imposing glitter was the 
object of his most watchful care. But his military 
aptitudes were confined to those of the drill- 
sergeant. Company drill, battalion drill, a grand 
review were his chief joy — a shabby uniform, a 
button awry, a mistake in some detail of kit were 
crimes to be suitably punished ; no stricter martinet 
ever existed.* But of strategy, tactics and the 
science of war, he knew no more than the youngest 
drummer in one of his pet regiments. Whenever he 
interfered in any of the wars in which he engaged, 
he only hindered and hampered his generals. 

When it became evident that his occupation of 

* The craze for absolute uniformity was exemplified in the Kur- 
ros (snub-nosed) Grenadier Regiment of the Emperor Paul. Not 
only was every nose in the regiment tip-tilted, but the meter-like 
brass shakos of the old pattern seen in Hogarth's pictures — "The 
March to Finchley," for example — each has a bullet-hole exactly 
in the same place. This was to commemorate an attempt on the 
Tsar's life. The bullet missed him, but found its billet in the 
shako of one of his guards. Whether the snub-noses and the 
shakos still exist I know not. They were very conspicuous in my 
time. 



Russia 287 

the Balkans was a strategic mistake, he had to call 
in old Prince Paskiewitch, the hero of his Persian 
War, to get him out of the scrape. Commissariat, 
equipment, munitions, transport, and the various 
subordinate necessaries for his army, were matters 
into which he did not deign to inquire. I do not 
propose to treat of the Crimean War; I will only 
say this much: that when I was discussing it one 
day, in 1863, with a Russian general, he told me 
that the losses suffered by the Tsar's army in the 
terrible marches to the Crimea cost them more men 
than all the fighting put together. Want of food, 
clothes, boots, medicine for the sick, the robberies 
of commissariat and contractors, killed the soldiers 
by tens of thousands. I was bound to confess that 
our men were not much better off, until my old 
friend Billy Russell roused the indignation of the 
people. 

In the autumn of 1854 the Tsar declared that he 
looked to "le General Fevrier" to finish the war. 
It did, but not as he hoped. In the month of Feb- 
ruary, 1855, he died suddenly and mysteriously. 
The stories which have been published of a linger- 
ing death lasting several days, and of touching fare- 
well interviews with the Empress and the Tsare- 
vitch, may be dismissed as fables; I have dwelt 
upon this in my "Memories." However that may 
be, whether he died a natural death from influenza, 
or whether, as many people believed, he took poison, 
it was a broken heart that killed him. The army 



288 Redesdale's Further Memories 

that he had loved, the army that he had made and 
drilled, clothed and cherished, had failed him. Pas- 
kiewitch, whom he thought invincible, had been 
compelled to raise the siege of Silistria; the battle 
of Giurgevo had been lost; his troops, the bugbear 
of Europe, had been driven across the Danube by 
the Turks. The heights of the Alma, the night of 
Inkermann told the same tale. Sevastopol was 
doomed. The proud man was beaten; there was 
nothing left to him in this life; he laid him down 
and died — a man of many mistakes, but to the last 
the great "gentleman" that he claimed to be. 

Once again the angel of death was merciful. He 
was spared the misery of the final and supreme 
defeat. His impregnable fortress fallen, his button- 
perfect army on which he pinned his faith shattered, 
the whole edifice of his hereditary ambition and his 
pious strivings crumbled to dust! 

That Nicholas was greatly feared by his people 
must be admitted ; at the same time, he was admired 
as something more than a man; and by those who 
surrounded him, though none came so often under 
the stinging lash of his displeasure, he was vene- 
rated and loved. His domestic life was perfect. 
He adored his wife — as he once said: "The first 
time I saw her I knew that I had met the guardian 
angel of my life." She was the sister of that poor 
King of Prussia who was chiefly famous for his 
dullness and his love of champagne — le Roi Cliquot, 



Russia 289 

as his Imperial brother-in-law was wont to call 
him. 

Russia had every right to look forward to a 
happy time under the milder rule of Alexander the 
Second, who, as Tsarevitch, had greatly endeared 
himself to the people by travelling through the 
country, taking pains personally to ascertain what 
were the wants and aspirations of the millions 
whom he was one day to rule, and interesting him- 
self on behalf of the political prisoners in Siberia, 
and endeavouring, so far as in him lay, to soften 
their hard lot. One of his first acts on coming to 
the throne was to release so many of the Deka- 
brists — the men of December — who were still 
living. 

It has been the fashion among writers upon 
Russia to depreciate Alexander as a weak ruler. 
They are kind enough to accredit him with a heart 
full of good intentions, but they taunt him with a 
lack of vigour of character. It is a hard matter 
for a Tsar to satisfy the requirements of historical 
critics. A Nicholas, with a stern hand, puts down 
a poisonous rebellion which aimed at nothing less 
than by corrupting the army to perpetrate the mur- 
der of the whole Imperial family. He is written 
down and held up to execration as a bloody-minded, 
revengeful tyrant. Then comes his son, who at 
once sets about a vast number of reforms for the 
benefit of his people, such as the emancipation of 
the Law Courts from the supreme power of the 



290 Redesdale's Further Memories 

politicians, the publication of an annual Budget, 
the establishment of provincial and district councils, 
and, above all, the emancipation of the serfs, of 
which I shall speak later. All these liberal benefits 
are ascribed to the feebleness of the Emperor, who, 
as they say, had not the force to resist the persis- 
tent demands of ministers. Such is the injustice 
of men and historians. Nothing astonished me 
more when I was in Russia than the freedom of 
speech. I had been brought up in the faith that to 
criticize the Emperor meant the knut and Siberia. 
On the contrary, I found at the clubs and in Society 
men talking, praising and blaming with all the con- 
fidence of truly free citizens, little heeding who 
should hear them, and I soon became aware that all 
the fables which I had heard of spies and reporters 
were just moonshine. Even officials and officers 
in the army unsparingly criticized the measures 
which they had to carry out and the men whom they 
must obey. 

One of the shrewdest critics of international 
politics that I ever knew was old Count Nicholas 
Pahlen, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this 
paper. A great traveller, and an excellent speaker 
of modern languages, he had been for half a cen- 
tury intimately associated with all the chief makers 
of the nineteenth century. He had, moreover, a 
marvellous memory, of which I may give an ex- 
ample. One day I found him in a great state of 
mind, fussing and fuming over some annoyance. 



Russia 291 

I asked what was the matter. He said: "I am 
losing my memory! I wanted to write down the 
Knights of the Garter — I remembered twenty-four, 
but for the life of me I could not recollect the 
twenty-fifth !" All of a sudden his face brightened. 
"I have it," he said, "the Duke of Westminster." 
The honour of his memory was saved. His mem- 
ory for political facts never failed him, and his 
judgment was not to be denied. His view of the 
state of affairs at the end of the Crimean War is 
given in one of those delightful letters with 
which Lord Granville used to keep Lord Canning 
posted in European matters whilst the latter was 
Governor-General in India. Lord Granville wrote, 
on the 3rd of August, 1856 (see "Lord Edmond 
Fitzmaurice's Life," vol. I., page 185): 

"Old Pahlen was the most irritable of all on this 
subject (the Crimean War). He says it has done 
no one good; not to the English, certainly not to 
the Russians — and has only been of use to one man 
in France,* whom he is not, as you know, fond of. 
He says that in England they considered him as 
merely speaking like a Russian parrot when he said 
that the Emperor Nicholas did not wish for war, 
and that he was considered in Russia almost a 
treacherous Anglomane when he declared that our 
Government did not wish it. He had been right in 
both cases, and yet by extraordinary bad manage- 

* The Emperor Louis Napoleon. 



292 Redesdale's Further Memories 

ment the war had come. He thinks it will take a 
whole generation to efface the recollection of it. He 
attributes the hatred of us, and comparative for- 
giveness of the French, not so much to the destruc- 
tion in the Baltic, not so much to our Press and our 
public speaking, as to our having been old friends, 
and their always having thought of the French as 
enemies. He does not believe in any great changes 
in Russia. The Emperor has good intentions, but 
there have always been good intentions at the be- 
ginning of each reign. He has one great advantage 
over his father. Alexander during his life told 
Nicholas nothing. Nicholas, since his son has been 
of age, told him everything, and the latter, being 
of a very amiable disposition, heard everything that 
others did not dare tell his father. He is supposed 
not to have military tastes, but he issued new regu- 
lations about uniforms almost before his father was 
buried; and he and Constantine appeared in new 
hussar jackets a day or two afterwards, which 
were supposed to be foreign, instead of a new dress 
which he had been in such a hurry to exhibit him- 
self in. He dismissed Klein Michel and another 
(two great robbers) ; and when his mother remon- 
strated on the ground of their having been his 
father's friends, he made a good answer, which he 
had probably previously prepared. He said : T am 
not a great man like my father. He could use such 
men as his tools — I am not strong enough.' He 
(Pahlen) lays much stress on the absolute poverty 




PRIX'CE GORTCHAKOFF 
From a photograph 



Russia 293 

of Russia in able men. He thinks Gortchakoff 
clever, but indiscreet, vain, and not successful in 
things which he undertakes. (This is confirmed by 
everybody.) 

"Tolstoi, a great friend of the Emperor, by whom 
he is called 'milord Tolstoi,' has no ability. 

"Kisseleff, who is named Ambassador to Paris, 
is clever, but has never been a diplomat and is 
seventy years old. Meyendorf, really clever, is 
done up. Chreptowitch is nobody. Orloff himself 
clever, but perfectly ignorant. He says that Gort- 
chakoff laments to everyone this dearth of men to 
appoint. So Bloomfield told me. Pahlen says that 
in England it does not signify if we want a man, 
we can always pick up an intelligent man in some 
rank of life or other who will soon master the speci- 
alties of his business. In Russia those who are 
not diplomatists by profession are profoundly igno- 
rant of all that relates to it." 

A long quotation — but the appreciation of the 
state of affairs in his own country by so competent 
an observer as Count Pahlen, recorded, moreover, 
by no less a man than Lord Granville, seems to me 
to justify and even invite its insertion here. I my- 
self knew almost all the men whom the Count men- 
tioned, and I can appreciate the accuracy of his 
estimate. In two cases, that of the new Tsar and 
that of M. Tolstoi, I think he was hardly fair. As 
it turned out, the reign of Alexander the Second, 



294 Redesdale's Further Memories 

if by no other measure than that of the liberation 
of the serfs, marked an important step in Russian 
history; while M. Jean Tolstoi — the "milord" — 
who was Postmaster-General in my time, proved to 
be a capable minister, none the worse for having 
travelled and being an accomplished man of the 
world. As Ambassador to England, Count Chrep- 
towitch, a delightful old gentleman, was not an 
eagle; and it was not long before the astute old 
Baron Brunnow — with the 

"Baroness Brunnow who looked like Juno" 

of the "Ingoldsby Legends" — appeared once more 
as pilot of the diplomatic ship among the rather 
difficult shoals of British waters. 

Nor at the outset of the new reign was English 
diplomacy any too strong. England, as Count 
Pahlen pointed out, was in bad odour at St. Peters- 
burg, and it needed all the exquisite tact of Lord 
Granville, when he went as special ambassador for 
the coronation, to conciliate the Emperor, while at 
the same time firmly giving His Majesty to under- 
stand that he must insist upon being received with 
the courtesy and consideration due to the Queen's 
personal representative. Lord Granville's letters 
to Lord Canning, quoted by Lord Fitzmaurice, 
tell the story in the most interesting way. 

The glove was of velvet, but the hand was of 
steel. It was no easy task, for Count Pahlen was 
quite right when he warned Lord Granville that the 



Russia 295 

Emperor was deeply prejudiced against England, 
and had quite thrown herself into the arms of 
France — a strange infatuation, considering that it 
was Louis Napoleon's personal ambition and ag- 
gressive policy which raised the question of the 
Holy Places, and was the cause of the war, whereas 
England did her best — a bad best, it must be ad- 
mitted — to preserve the peace. Yet France was in 
high favour, while for us there was as yet no for- 
giveness. At any rate, Lord Granville's special em- 
bassy was a great success, and for years afterwards 
the Russians spoke with enthusiasm of the English 
grand seigneur who had conquered a force de plaire 
and upheld the dignity of his country. If in some 
future decade, century, or aeon, I, on the eve of a 
new incarnation, should be consulted by the gods 
as to the quality with which I should prefer to be 
endowed, I should have little hesitation in asking 
to be blessed with the tact of Lord Granville. 

Lord Wodehouse, afterwards Earl of Kimberley, 
who was our Minister at St. Petersburg, was a man 
of great ability, singularly well read and thoroughly 
posted in diplomatic lore. He knew his trade, but 
he had not the secret of treating business with 
charm. His talents were better fitted to the fuligin- 
ous atmosphere of Downing Street than to the 
bright sparkling air of the Russian capital. It was 
single-stick, very doughty single-stick, against the 
light play of the foils. The contrast with that skil- 
ful fencer, Lord Granville, was great. But the 



296 Redesdale's Further Memories 

victories gained by the latter could only be tempo- 
rary. He had to go, and Lord Wodehouse re- 
mained, a brilliantly dull man — or would it be better 
to say a dully brilliant man? — quite out of his ele- 
ment in the glittering gaiety of a Russian salon. 
Those who knew his solid worth appreciated his 
wisdom and scrupulous honesty. But he was rather 
a great parliamentarian than a courtly diplomatist. 
When he opened the flood-gates of his talk, it was 
a Niagara that issued forth, carrying all before it, 
not to be stopped or stayed, and this deluge was 
made even more overwhelming by a doctoral or 
donnish manner, which absolutely staggered the 
delightfully smart and rather cynical Prince Gort- 
chakoff. As for the Emperor, the voluble envoy 
frankly bored him. Lord Wodehouse could earn 
respect for England, but not affection. 

Nor was England much better served when his 
place was taken in 1858 by Sir John Crampton, a 
most delightful personality, but, in spite of his long 
experience, little fitted for such a post as St. Peters- 
burg. The truth is that he was a Bohemian of the 
Bohemians, a man who loved his ease and to whom 
the donning of a fine coat and a star was little short 
of torture. I knew him well, for he was a contem- 
porary of my father's in the service, and there were 
few days — when he was on leave in London — on 
which he did not knock at our door. Pie had all 
the gifts of the Irish raconteur, and his stories were 
enhanced by the charm of a musical speaking voice 



Russia 297 

— a great, handsome, leonine figure, with his silver 
hair and beard, whose advent we always hailed with 
joy. Probably he was at his best in his beautiful 
Irish home near Powerscourt, where, with a con- 
genial friend or two — notably old Sharpe, the ec- 
centric Dublin artist — he could sit and smoke after 
dinner in the same frieze coat that he had worn 
all day. With us and very few other friends he 
would sit by the fire, a great tame cat, purring the 
livelong winter afternoon. However great his per- 
sonal attractiveness might be, he was certainly not 
successful as a diplomatist. 

When he was at Washington, President Pierce 
broke off relations with him on account of his re- 
cruiting activities — when there were men wanted 
for the Foreign Legion in the Crimean War. It 
was the one case in which he overcame his consti- 
tutional indolence, and it was not lucky. He had 
to leave the United States, but Lord Palmerston, 
always the generous defender of his subordinates, 
stood up for him, and sent him as Minister to Han- 
over, at the same time decorating him with the 
K.C.B., and thence he was transferred to St. Peters- 
burg, a post where the members of the diplomatic 
body, unless they were prepared to face all the re- 
quirements of a delightful but rather exacting 
society, were bound to become mere cyphers. 

That is what happened to Sir John Crampton, 
and that, too, at a moment when it was very im- 
portant to bury the hatchet and establish relations 



298 Redesdale's Further Memories 

of cordial friendship and sympathy with the Tsar 
and his ministers. It was at last the tame cat na- 
ture to which I have alluded above which brought 
about his retirement from Russia in i860, and his 
transfer to Spain, where at that moment there was 
little urgency for activity. In an unlucky moment 
for all concerned, Balfe came to St. Petersburg, 
with his beautiful young daughter Victoire, who 
had been engaged at the Opera. Naturally the Irish 
Minister and the Irish composer forgathered, and 
Balfe's rooms were a delightfully congenial place, 
where, when the young lady was not singing at the 
theatre, Crampton could pass the lazy evenings, 
free from the cramping fetters of a tailcoat and 
from all the irksome restraint and exigencies of a 
diplomatist's life. Balfe, whom I knew well for 
many years, was himself endowed with all the fas- 
cination of Irish wit and bonhomie, while his 
daughter was as attractive as youth, beauty and 
talent could make her. They must have been a de- 
lightful trio — but the lotus-eating was not to last. 
There came a day when Balfe, in the character of 
the pere noble, told Sir John that his visits must 
cease — the old story, his daughter's happiness was 
at stake — and so the veteran diplomatist hoisted the 
white flag, surrendered unconditionally, and Janu- 
ary and May were united for a very brief time, at 
the end of which the marriage was annulled, and 
the lady married the Due de Friar, a grandee of 
Spain. 



Russia 299 

When I reached St. Petersburg in 1863, and went 
through the archives of the Embassy, which were 
in my charge, I found that there was a dispatch 
missing. No trace could be found of it and no one 
had ever seen it. I wrote to London, asking the 
Foreign Office to send out a copy. When it came, 
it turned out to be a severe wigging from Lord 
Russell, scolding Crampton for not keeping him 
better informed on Russian affairs. Crampton had 
burned the dispatch! It was easy for him to do 
this, for the messenger arrived about ten o'clock 
at night, and he was in the habit of opening the bag 
himself, and only sending down its contents to the 
Chancery on the following morning. This particu- 
lar document he kept to himself. In 1869 he left the 
service, and from that time lived chiefly at his Irish 
home in County Wicklow, where he died, full of 
years and comfort, in 1886, greatly regretted by all 
of us who knew him as a dear, kind, affectionate old 
friend. 

Never was there a happier appointment than that 
of Lord Napier, who succeeded him in Russia in 
i860, with the more exalted title of Ambassador, 
seconded by an ambassadress who seemed to have 
been born for the position. The British Embassy 
soon became the most popular centre of society in 
Russia. John Lumley — afterwards Lord Savile — 
was First Secretary (what would now be called 
Councillor), and he was a most valuable aide-de- 
camp socially to his chief, In these happy circum- 



300 Redesdale's Further Memories 

stances the prestige and influence increased every 
day, until at the end, when Lord Napier, in 1864, 
was transferred to Berlin, the Emperor Alexander 
wished to give him the Order of St. Andrew, the 
Garter of Russia, but unfortunately in those days 
the acceptance of foreign Orders was strictly for- 
bidden. Queen Victoria was like Queen Elizabeth, 
who said that she would not allow her dogs to wear 
any collar but her own. 

Few men ever had a much more difficult task 
than that with which Lord Napier was confronted 
when he took possession of the Embassy. Not only 
did he conjure into life a new popularity out of the 
ashes of the dead indifference, and worse, in which 
England was held, but he succeeded in winning 
the personal love and affection of all with whom he 
came in contact; and this he did in spite of the 
emasculate meddlings in Polish affairs which were 
the favourite pastime of Lord Russell and the 
cynical amusement of Prince Gortchakoff. 

It must not be supposed that Lord Napier did 
not himself openly condemn much that was going 
on in Poland ; but he did so with tact, as an onlooker, 
and not like Lord Russell, with the appearance of 
impertinent interference in the internal government 
of a friendly country. There were, as I have shown 
in my "Memories," many Russians in high positions 
who were outspoken in their detestation of General 
Muraireff, whom Prince Suvoroff did not hesitate 
to call a "hangman" in the Tsar's presence at a ban- 



Russia 301 

quet at Tsarskoe Selo. Lord Napier would have 
cried "Amen" to that. But though he was an un- 
compromising critic, he never forfeited the good- 
will of the court to which he was accredited. 

The honour and reputation of England were safe 
in his hands, and he enjoyed an influence which had 
been vouchsafed to none of his predecessors. What 
Prince Gortchakoff and all other Russians resented 
in Lord Russell was the schoolmaster tone of his 
dispatches. That Prince SuvorofFs condemnation 
of the cruelties of Warsaw did not meet with an 
Imperial reproof was significant enough, and an 
English ambassador would find plenty of men who 
would applaud a similar reproof from him. But 
none of them, even of those who were loudest in 
their blame, would accept Lord Russell's sermons 
and prescriptions. The Polish Revolution was a 
terrible first act in the drama upon which the cur- 
tain was to fall in so tragic a fashion. 

The liberation of the serfs in 1861 was mani- 
festly the greatest achievement of Alexander's 
reign — indeed, it was one of the greatest and 
noblest achievements in the whole history of So- 
ciety. It was a great upheaval, far more wide- 
reaching and searching than the abolition of negro 
slavery which rewarded the humane labours of 
Clarkson, Sharp and Wilberforce. That only af- 
fected the planters of the West Indies. There were 
no negro slaves in London, Edinburgh, or Dublin. 
In Russia, on the contrary, serfdom was universal. 



302 Redesdale's Further Memories 

There were serfs even among the tradesmen of St. 
Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw, and all the great 
towns — men who had raised themselves by industry 
and knowledge into a higher status than that of 
the drudge or labourer, the hewer of wood and 
drawer of water, but who yet remained serfs, and 
had to pay a share of their gains to their lords. The 
fortunes of rich Boyarin were calculated in the 
souls of men. There had been more than once talk 
of putting an end to this horror, but it was left 
to the generous and good Tsar to carry the reform 
into execution. He was ably seconded by M. Va- 
louieff, Minister of the Interior, who worked out 
all the details of the scheme. It was no easy task 
to carry out so mighty a change, for, of course, 
the vested interests were powerful and the mighty 
ego was on guard, as ever; but the Tsar was in 
deadly earnest, and in spite of all opposition, twenty- 
three millions of dead souls were born again into 
life. 

It was an audaciously bold piece of statesman- 
ship. Even an autocrat is dependent upon the will 
of others for his power. He cannot stand up in 
the Agora, and, like a god, proclaim himself "I am 
that I am!" He needs support, and in Russia at 
that time, when the proletariat had not yet even 
the semblance of political existence, the only prop 
upon which the Tsar could rely was the noblesse, 
and it was precisely their privileges that he was 
attacking. It needed moral courage, it needed 



Russia 303 

physical courage, to set such a machinery in motion. 
Remember who and what were the men who mur- 
dered the Emperor Paul. Not a gang of revolution- 
ary carbonari— Turgenieff was not yet born and 
the word "Nihilist" had not yet been coined* — but 
a band of powerful nobles, headed by his own prime 
minister. Remember who were the leading Deka- 
brists, men bearing historic names, proud of their 
descent from the sacred stock of Rurik. It was 
men of that importance who would be the most 
affected by the change, and whose opposition was 
to be feared. No weak man would have braved 
them. It is true that emancipation had long been 
in the air, and that a great number — perhaps even 
a large majority — of the landed aristocracy had 
pledged themselves to it. But there was a danger- 
ous leaven of discontent, and none could say how 
far the taint might have penetrated. 

M. Valouieff, the minister who was the Tsar's 
right-hand man in this difficult business, was a re- 
markable personality. Strikingly handsome, tall 
and dignified, with all the characteristics of blue 
blood, he was not dwarfed even by the mighty 
stature of his Imperial master. When, two years 
after the liberation of the serfs in Russia, the meas- 
ure was extended to Poland, I was present, as I 
have related in my "Memories," at the reception of 
the Tsar of the peasants' deputation who came to 

* The word "Nihilist" first appeared in TurgeniefFs story, 
"Fathers and Sons," in 1861. 



304 Redesdale's Further Memories 

St. Petersburg to thank the Tsar. It was impos- 
sible not to be struck by the commanding aspect 
of the Emperor and his minister, both sons of Anak, 
towering above the rest of the crowd. 

The emancipation of the serfs was, of course, 
Valouieff's masterpiece of statesmanship, but he 
had several other measures of first-class importance 
to his credit. It was he who in 1864 established 
the Zemstvo — elected bodies for the local conduct 
of provincial business — and another of his achieve- 
ments was the regulation of the laws relating to 
the Press. He, moreover, had something of a liter- 
ary reputation as the author of two or three novels. 
But these were rather amateurish, and it is upon his 
statesmanship that his fame must rest. 

Like the Chancellor, Prince GortchakofT, he was 
very kind to me, and whenever we met in Society, 
he always had a friendly word for me. When I 
got back to London, he was next to Prince Gort- 
chakofT, the Russian statesman in whom I found 
Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon the most in- 
terested. They fully appreciated the greatness of 
his work in the emancipation business, and were 
glad to have some first-hand impressions of his very 
remarkable personality. 

The emancipation was a colossal task. It is not 
possible by a mere stroke of the pen to revolutionize 
the lives of twenty-three millions of men. The serfs 
were to be freed — that is easily said ; but the inter- 
ests of the landed aristocracy must also be taken 



Russia 305 

into consideration, and it says much for Valouieff's 
statesmanship and wisdom that the measure should 
have been carried into effect practically without 
any friction. 

It was impossible suddenly to deprive of its 
labour the whole of the agricultural land of that 
vast empire. There had to be a transition period 
during which the peasants, though no longer serfs, 
still remained under certain obligations to their 
former masters; but within the space of two years 
the landlords were bound to make over to them 
their houses with suitable allotments of land against 
a fair rent, with the further privilege of purchase, 
with the consent of the proprietor. The obligations 
of the peasant and his rent were capitalized on a 
basis of six per cent. Of this capital, twenty per 
cent, was to be paid at once to the landlord, while 
the Government gave him the remaining eighty per 
cent, in Government bonds bearing five per cent, 
interest, the Government recouping itself for this 
advance in forty-nine years by a payment of six per 
cent, from the peasant. The purchases might be 
effected by single individuals or by partnerships. 
This would be facilitated by the Russian communal 
system, by which the members of each commune 
were able to combine for the redemption money and 
other expenses. 

It was calculated that about one-third of the 
property of the landed aristocracy, equal to 390,886 
square kilometres, was made over to the peasants. 



306 Redesdale's Further Memories 

This is Brockhaus' calculation. He goes on to point 
out that for various reasons, chiefly the ignorance 
and intemperance of the peasants, there were not a 
few troubles arising out of the great economic 
change. Although in some instances land soon rose 
in value fifty per cent, above the estimate of 1861, 
in others it suffered great deterioration. 

There is one feature in this great economic 
change which is worthy of note. If we read the 
lives, memoirs and correspondence of the ministers 
who have ruled England in modern times, it is im- 
possible not to recognize an underlying element 
of personal ambition in all their contentions. That, 
I take it, is inseparable from a constitutional Gov- 
ernment where the "Outs" are always struggling to 
become "Ins." Here there was no such motive pos- 
sible. A Tsar of Russia could become no greater 
than he already was, and even the minister who did 
his behest had nothing to fear or to gain from the 
arbitrium popularis aurae. The Emperor had, and 
could have, nothing in view but the good of his 
people, and for that those who saw him at work 
knew that his efforts were untiring. It is strange 
that it should have been precisely in the reign of 
so good a monarch, a real benefactor of the world 
over which he ruled, that the seeds of the poisonous 
plant of Nihilism should have germinated, spread- 
ing like the virus of cancer, which, cut out of one 
place by the surgeon's knife, still travels through 
the system and reappears in some new spot. 



Russia 307 

Nihilism was not confined, as has been popularly- 
supposed, to the students of the universities and a 
few clever but discontented literary men and artists. 
As a matter of fact, it had invaded all classes. The 
civil service, the army, the police — even the secret 
police — were infected. 

The diplomatic negotiations which took place at 
St. Petersburg in the winter of 1863-64 were big 
with the fate of Europe and of the world. It was 
the result of the grievous blunders made by Lord 
Russell that Prussia was enabled to take the first 
step in that career of plunder and aggrandisement 
which has wrought such terrible tragedies. I have 
dealt with that story fully in my "Memories." I 
was at St. Petersburg at the time, and owing to my 
confidential relations with Lord Napier, and to the 
kindness of Prince Gortchakoff and other Russian 
ministers, I had the opportunity of being well 
posted, not only in what took place publicly, but also 
in the feeling which was prevalent in Russia in 
regard to the Danish war. 

In his brilliantly fascinating fourth volume of the 
"Life of Lord Beacons field," Mr. Buckle* revives 
the time-honoured fallacy that Russia was not 
ready to join hands with us in defence of Denmark. 
That fallacy can only owe its existence to the care- 
ful handling of persons whose aim it was to white- 

* "The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield," Vol IV 
P- 342. 



308 Redesdale's Further Memories 

wash Lord Russell. It is true that his blustering 
and bullying in the Polish Revolution — followed by 
the eating of the leek with appetite — had made Eng- 
land very unpopular in Russia; but in regard to 
Denmark there was another motive at work, and a 
very powerful one, in the prospective marriage of 
the Princess Dagmar to the Tsarevitch. 

In principle, Russia did not want to go to war, 
but she was ready to sacrifice her wish for peace 
if only England would join in with her and cry 
"Hands off!" to Prussia and Austria. England did 
not want war in July, 19 14, but on the 4th of Au- 
gust war was declared. The cases are exactly 
similar. In both cases a "scrap of paper" was torn 
up by Prussia, who only a few months earlier had 
guaranteed the integrity of King Christian's do- 
minions. In 1 9 1 4 mercifully Lord Russell had been 
long "resting and being thanked" over the mischief 
he had wrought. Sterner and more chivalrous doc- 
trines prevailed, and this time England was ready 
to draw the sword for a principle of honour. 

It is, I know, an absolute mistake to suppose that 
if we had carried out the policy indicated by Lord 
Palmerston in Parliament at the end of the Session 
of 1863 we should have stood alone. Russia would 
have been with us. Our position, supposing we had 
gone to war, would have been all to our advantage 
— as Lord John Manners pointed out, it would have 
been "the most popular, the easiest and the cheapest 
war (for it can be managed by our navy alone) of 



Russia 309 

the century."* Lord John Manners was quite 
right. We should have sent our navy to Danish 
waters, and we need not have sent out a single 
soldier. 

To march upon Berlin would have been a mere 
holiday task for the Russian army, a sort of picnic, 
like our march upon Magdala. But I can assert 
that it was the firm conviction of the best informed 
diplomatists of Europe that the mere knowledge 
that England and Russia were determined to uphold 
the rights of Denmark would of itself have sufficed 
to avert war. I have written elsewhere how, when 
Lord Napier had to tell Prince Gortchakoff that 
England would not join with him, the Prince an- 
swered : "Alors, milord, je mets de cote la supposi- 
tion que TAngleterre fasse jamais la guerre pour 
une question d'honneur." That was the conviction 
which guided him in all his subsequent dealings 
with England, the advances in Central Asia, in de- 
fiance of all treaties, until the gates of Afghanistan 
were reached, and in 1870, when France was 
crippled, the tearing up of the Black Sea Treaty 
obligations of 1856. 

Mr. Buckle is so clear-minded a critic of foreign 
politics that I should hesitate to differ from him 
were I not possessed of absolute knowledge not 
from hearsay. A study of the "Origines diplo- 
matiques de la guerre de 1870" can only confirm 
what I have said; and that exhaustive publication 

* Buckle's "Life of Disraeli," ut supra, Vol. IV., p. 343- 



310 Redesdale's Further Memories 

proves up to the hilt my contention that since the 
origin of the war of 1870 was due to the betrayal 
of Denmark in 1863-64, it is to the grave political 
blunders then made that we must ascribe the out- 
rage of 1 91 4. 

Free of England and Russia, Bismarck was able 
to carry out his full programme: (1) Kiel and a 
navy. (2) The crippling of Austria. (3) The hu- 
miliation of France. (4) Who can doubt what 
that was ? The destruction of England's sea power, 
and the world under the heel of Prussia. 

Lord Russell's meddling and muddling in the 
affairs of Poland had, it is true, estranged Russia 
and France. But the former Power was, never- 
the less, keenly in favour of Denmark; as regards 
France, there was perhaps another consideration 
which was not without its influence. It is a matter 
of common knowledge that Louis Napoleon was 
very ambitious to build up a navy which should be 
able to hold its own with ours. In the "Origines 
diplomatiques" there is published a dispatch from 
the French charge d'affaires at St. Petersburg, M. 
de Massignac, a very clever man, with whom I was 
intimate, urging upon M. Drouyn de Lhuys the 
expediency of furthering the views of Prussia. He 
pointed out that the success of Prussia would give 
her Kiel, and enable her to build a navy which 
might, in given circumstances, help the other Con- 
tinental Powers to destroy England's preponderant 
supremacy at sea ! I am inclined to think that this 



Russia 311 

view may have had more restraining influence with 
Louis Napoleon even than the snubbing with which 
Lord Russell met his proposals for a conference 
or congress at Brussels. We know, moreover, that 
the Emperor had a distinct leaning towards Prussia, 
which he looked upon as making for progress in 
contradistinction to Austria, which in his eyes was 
antiquated and retrograde. 

It was, then, at St. Petersburg that the fate of 
Denmark was sealed and the first triumph of Bis- 
marck's policy secured. The Danish Duchies were 
stolen by Prussia, and, as my old friend M. de 
Massignac had foreseen, the foundations were laid 
of a navy which up to that time had been a dream 
in Cloudcuckooland. For the shameful abandon- 
ment of Denmark we are now, fifty years later, 
paying the just penalty. 



THE END 



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